pinehilljoe
Staff Sergeant
Any recommendations for a good book on the Enigma? or general codes of WW II?
Looking for a book on the Enigma and other machines (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter pinehilljoe
- Start date
Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules
yosimitesam
Senior Airman
The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes - Gordon Welchman ISBN 9781478793984
Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park - F.H. Hinsley, A. Stripp ISBN 9780198203278
What most people don't realize is that while the Enigma information was extremely valuable, the really "high level" SIGINT actually came from decrypting the German online teleprinter cyphers. This is how Hitler and the German high command communicated with the Army Group commands at the higest level. These messages were broken using an early version of a true "computer" that contained thousands of vaccum tubes, named "Colossus". It was an even greater achievement than cracking Enigma messages.
Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret - Paul Gannon ISBN 9781843543312
These three are the "cream" of the books containing enough technical detail to satisfy anyone's curiosity. The last book on "Colossus" is long and extremely detailed.
Last edited:
yosimitesam
Senior Airman
For the Pacific, here are the best books I've read. Note that the Japanese used "code books" instead of "machine encryption", which were attacked in a different method using IBM card sorters and accounting machines, en masse. (The only exception was "Purple" which handled only diplomatic/embassy coms.) The Japanese Army codes weren't broken into until 1944 (due to a lucky find by an Australian engineer looking for mines) while the Naval codes were usually penetrated in a few months. They didn't have enough Jap Army material to work on but had plenty of Naval, as well as merchant marine codes, etc. There were about 40 different codes used by the Japanese at any one time, but most were low-level and not so useful except to help in breaking in to the higher level codes.
You can read all about that in these:
The American Magic: Codes, Ciphers and the Defeat of Japan Ronald Lewin ISBN 9780374104177
MacArthur's ULTRA: Codebreaking and the War against Japan, 1942-1945 Edward J. Drea 9780700605767
Ultra in the Pacific: How Breaking Japanese Codes and Ciphers Affected Naval Operations Against Japan, 1941-45 John Winton ISBN 978180055499
Combined Fleet Decoded: The Secret History of American Intelligence and the Japanese Navy in World War II John Prados ISBN9780679437017
Note also that the ISBN numbers are different in hardback and paperback books, so rely on the title and author when searching.
Good Luck!
Edit: It was Jan 44' when the codebooks were found by an Australian engineer.
Last edited:
yosimitesam
Senior Airman
The breaking of Purple (Japanese diplomatic machine cipher) is a story in itself. There are only two good books on this, IMO.
The Story of Magic - Memoirs of an American Cryptologic Pioneer - Frank B. Rowlet ISBN 0894122738
The Man Who Broke Purple - The Life of Colonel William F. Friedman - Ronald Clark (No ISBN)
These are good reads that get into the "culture" of the small but highly efficient Army Security Agency group of codebreakers before and during WWII. More biography than technical, they are still a very good read.
(I broke this info into 3 replies to not overwhelm you with information. Sometimes I just can't shut up, especially on subjects about which I'm passionate.)
Last edited:
Nick Beale
Airman
Enigma, The Battle for the Codes by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore (very good, starts from the earliest days of the machine and spies' efforts to acquire one)
Seizing the Enigma by David Kahn (mostly about the U-boat war)
I'd second the recommendation for Codebreakers, especially if you want to learn how to operate the machine.
Seizing the Enigma by David Kahn (mostly about the U-boat war)
I'd second the recommendation for Codebreakers, especially if you want to learn how to operate the machine.
ThomasP
Chief Master Sergeant
If you are looking to see how it works take a look at the "Cipher Machines and Cryptology" website.
"https://www.ciphermachinesandcryptology.com/files/Enigma Sim Manual.pdf"
"https://www.ciphermachinesandcryptology.com/files/Enigma Sim Manual.pdf"
- Thread starter
- #7
pinehilljoe
Staff Sergeant
MIflyer
Captain
"Between Silk and Cyanide" is about the codes used by British undercover spies.
I think the book "The Ultra Secret" was the first book on the subject. The secret was kept classified until the early 70's
One thing few people realize is that Enigma machines were sold commercially before WW2, so figuring out the proper settings was the big problem, not how the machine worked.
I think the book "The Ultra Secret" was the first book on the subject. The secret was kept classified until the early 70's
One thing few people realize is that Enigma machines were sold commercially before WW2, so figuring out the proper settings was the big problem, not how the machine worked.
- Thread starter
- #9
pinehilljoe
Staff Sergeant
Weren't the Enigmas marketed to Corporation and Financial institutions for messaging?
special ed
1st Lieutenant
- 7,035
- May 13, 2018
Decades back, a gunshop I used to visit had a working code machine made by Walther.
yosimitesam
Senior Airman
That's correct. In theory, if you develop a "good" encryption machine, it must have an ENORMOUS key space. That is, the key settings are what makes the machine difficult to solve. In theory, you can give "Serial Number 1" of the manufactured machine to your "enemy" as a gift, and the machine still cannot be solved. For "odometric" machines (operating like an auto's odometer), Friedman wrote a paper just before WW2 that showed (mathematically) than any such machine can "eventually" be solved by searching for isomorphisms. Even if the turnovers are accelerated (the fast wheel causes the next slower wheel to turn more than once per cycle, an so on up the chain), the machine is still theoretically solvable but requires more "traffic" to work on. (The British TYPEX worked this way and was much more secure than ENIGMA.) That's why Friedman and Rowlett designed the SIGABA to use pseudo-random (irregular) stepping and not odometric stepping. For the post-WW2 cold war the KL7 machine did the same. Both machines are extremely difficult to solve. (In one article I read, an NSA employee admitted that the SIGABA wasn't "solved" in a general way until the computer power at the NSA of the early 1980's was available. There are several "solutions" to SIGABA on the web as academic papers, but all require a lot of encrypted messages in the same key and long computer runs.) As far as I can find the KL7 (early 1950's through late 1970's) has never been "solved" in a purely cryptanalysis way. From one of these papers on the SIGABA:
The KL7 cold-war encryption device had the following keyspace:
For those of you who haven't fallen asleep yet from this post, here are some links to emulators that I wrote for the SIGABA and KL7 encryption machines. It shows explicitly what happens during encryption and decryption. These links are to my "drop box" like site. No additional software is required as they are self-contained. There are Linux and Windows versions at the sites. There's a 'Help' button that displays a document (in your browser) of how to use these.
SIGABA (YASE) Link: YASE (Yet Another SIGABA Emulator)
KL7 Link: KL7 Emulator
Enjoy, and sorry for the long post.
buffnut453
Captain
Enigma machines were used for a long time after WW2 by many countries. That's partly why there was a concerted effort not to reveal the techniques used to crack the machines.
yosimitesam
Senior Airman
Yes they were. Hebern eventually went bankrupt due to lack of sales, wherein the U.S. Government essentially "stole" his ideas even though they were protected by patents. (His estate eventually got a settlement from the U.S. after WW2.) Scherbius was somewhat more successful as the Germans started experimenting with and using his (modified) device in 1926. He died in 1929 in an accident and never got to know how "famous" his machine was to eventually become.
yosimitesam
Senior Airman
It's worse, in fact. After WW2 and the Cold War heating up, the NSA wanted to be the "sole franchise holder" of all things having to do with encryption technology. After the successes in WW2, the NSA could not swallow the fact that anything involving encryption/decryption was not illegal. (If you wrote a note to your girlfriend using a shared code between the two of you, the NSA wanted the right to have the justice department prosecute you!) The NSA started getting desperate in the 1960's and 1970's since the Europeans were not buying into that crap and also knew that the NSA tried to listen in on EVERYTHING, including them. Finally, in 1993, the NSA proposed that all PC's, phones, and other electronic devices that could encrypt have a "back door" chip that allowed someone (NSA, Dept. of Justice, et. al.) to eavesdrop. In theory they would have to get a warrant to do this. Yea, sure. Even Clinton, President at the time, promoted the idea. (Do a Wiki search on "Clipper chip" and read that article. It's a good one. They tried to prosecute the programmer who wrote PGP for "exporting" cryptographic software!) The blow-back was tremendous. Military grade encryption was already "in the wild" in European countries and the USA, and that infuriated the NSA to no end. They tried desperately to put a stop to it. If it looks like a turd, smells like a turd, it definitely is a turd, so every techie in the world believed. The idea went nowhere.
MIflyer
Captain
Yes, because the British, having hacked them, kept the fact secret and handed them out to "Allies" as Unbreakable, saying "We never defeated these things. They will give you good service." Heh, heh.
However, some Germans became convinced that the Allies were decoding Enigma and started getting more careful about radio transmissions; that is why the Battle of the Bulge came as such a surprise.
When they captured the U-505 the intelligence people would liked to have had those victorious sailors all shot, since if the word got out they had a sub then their hacking of Enigma would be for naught. The Germans would add another stage to the machines and they decoding would be set back by years. So they made haul the U-505 all the way to Bermuda, where the fact of its capture could more easily be covered up.
Also the Germans did not use teletype in WW2 but a system called "hellscriber" which used an inked screw thread to produce a kind of "dot matrix" printing on long paper tape. There was an article in Ham Radio magazine describing how that system worked and a few Amateur Radio people actually used them on the air. So, you not only had to decode the Enigma messages but also come up with a way to display them, since the Allies did not use that system.
A cruder form of encoding used to communicate with agents in Occupied Europe was the poem code. An agent memorized a poem and then used it to translate letters into numbers for transmission over the radio by Morse Code. For example, if the poem was, "Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere ...." then L = 1, i = 2, s = 3, t = 4, e = 5 and so on until you have a number for each letter of the alphabet. But if the Germans could figure out which poem you were using it was simple for them to decode it. Also the letter E is the most common one in the English language so the frequency of that number's use gave away that much. I have wondered why they did not just leave out half of the e's, since it is pretty easy to come up with a message missing a bunch of e's that is still easily readable.
The book Between Silk and Cyanide describes the authors attempt to improve the encoding used by the agents. As a test they gave him a message to decode and seemed very surprised when it took him several hours to decode it. Turned out they had given him the key but he assumed they just wanted it hacked and did not look for the key, since decoding with the key would have been trivial and he had no reason to think they would want him to do that. He pushed for one time codes printed on silk so they could be easily hidden under clothing.
Last edited:
special ed
1st Lieutenant
- 7,035
- May 13, 2018
I remember the "Gold bug code" from a high school novel. I guess the NSA didn't read novels.
Many of the breakthroughs in breaking the Enigma and Lorenz codes were possible due to operators breaking their procedures. Post war a German involved in their codes was interviewed. He wasnt surprised that codes were broken he was very surprised that they were broken almost real time and on an industrial scale. The second Colossus machine came on line just before D day allowing Eisenhower to be given the complete German order of battle in France.
yosimitesam
Senior Airman
Replying to my own posting. Here's a brief section from Wiki about the "PGP affair". I downloaded PGP and installed it on my PC around 1995 or so, but I never bothered to "set it up" as that would take a modicum of work. ("The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.")
This shows how the NSA (with NO policing power) was having a fit and trying to "put the genie back in the bottle" through the Dept. of Justice. Or, the NSA was trying to prevent any future "genies" from escaping the bottle.
Begin Wiki text:
In a posting of June 5, 2001, entitled "PGP Marks 10th Anniversary", Zimmermann describes the circumstances surrounding his release of PGP:
"It was on this day in 1991 that I sent the first release of PGP to a couple of my friends for uploading to the Internet. First, I sent it to Allan Hoeltje, who posted it to Peacenet, an ISP that specialized in grassroots political organizations, mainly in the peace movement. Peacenet was accessible to political activists all over the world. Then, I uploaded it to Kelly Goen, who proceeded to upload it to a Usenet newsgroup that specialized in distributing source code. At my request, he marked the Usenet posting as "US only". Kelly also uploaded it to many BBS systems around the country. I don't recall if the postings to the Internet began on June 5th or 6th. It may be surprising to some that back in 1991, I did not yet know enough about Usenet newsgroups to realize that a "US only" tag was merely an advisory tag that had little real effect on how Usenet propagated newsgroup postings. I thought it actually controlled how Usenet routed the posting. But back then, I had no clue how to post anything on a newsgroup, and didn't even have a clear idea what a newsgroup was."
PGP found its way onto the Internet and rapidly acquired a considerable following around the world. Users and supporters included dissidents in totalitarian countries (some affecting letters to Zimmermann have been published, some of which have been included in testimony before the US Congress), civil libertarians in other parts of the world (see Zimmermann's published testimony in various hearings), and the 'free communications' activists who called themselves cypherpunks (who provided both publicity and distribution); decades later, CryptoParty activists did much the same via Twitter.
Criminal investigation
Shortly after its release, PGP encryption found its way outside the United States, and in February 1993 Zimmermann became the formal target of a criminal investigation by the US Government for "munitions export without a license". At the time, cryptosystems using keys larger than 40 bits were considered munitions within the definition of the US export regulations; PGP has never used keys smaller than 128 bits, so it qualified at that time. Penalties for violation, if found guilty, were substantial. After several years, the investigation of Zimmermann was closed without filing criminal charges against him or anyone else.
Zimmermann challenged these regulations in an imaginative way. In 1995, he published the entire source code of PGP in a hardback book, via MIT Press, which was distributed and sold widely. Anybody wishing to build their own copy of PGP could cut off the covers, separate the pages, and scan them using an OCR program (or conceivably enter it as a type-in program if OCR software was not available), creating a set of source code text files. One could then build the application using the freely available GNU Compiler Collection. PGP would thus be available anywhere in the world. The claimed principle was simple: export of munitions—guns, bombs, planes, and software—was (and remains) restricted; but the export of books is protected by the First Amendment. The question was never tested in court with respect to PGP. In cases addressing other encryption software, however, two federal appeals courts have established the rule that cryptographic software source code is speech protected by the First Amendment (the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Bernstein case and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Junger case).
US export regulations regarding cryptography remain in force, but were liberalized substantially throughout the late 1990s. Since 2000, compliance with the regulations is also much easier. PGP encryption no longer meets the definition of a non-exportable weapon, and can be exported internationally except to seven specific countries and a list of named groups and individuals (with whom substantially all US trade is prohibited under various US export controls).
The criminal investigation was dropped in 1996.
MIflyer
Captain
In the book Between Silk and Cyanide book the author said he grew suspicious of the situation in Occupied Netherlands when one spy ended his transmission with Morse Code for "HH." That was how the German operators ended their transmissions; it stood for "Heil Hitler." So was the spy sending that as a subtle way of indicating he had been captured by the Germans? The Germans might be so used to the eight "dots" that made "HH" that they would not notice if a British spy did it as well.
So on the next exchange of messages he had the operator on the British end send his last transmission ended with "HH." The spy responded with "HH" before shutting down.
He informed his superiors that based on that response he believed the the whole British spy network in Holland had been taken over by the Germans. His superiors threw a fit! He was NOT supposed to conduct experiments with agents in the field. But it turned out he was right. Every agent or supply drop sent to Holland fell right into the German's hands.
Turing's biography is also interesting, if you can dig through all the math.
I made an enigma simulator some years ago ( you can read about that here) and got halfway to write the Bombe as well. Then life got in the way and I never finished it.
I made an enigma simulator some years ago ( you can read about that here) and got halfway to write the Bombe as well. Then life got in the way and I never finished it.
