Posted on 07/08/2009 3:52:05 AM PDT by Osnome
So many technologies of Code Encrption were used and could have been used in WW2 by both sides. David Kahn in his book THE CODEBREAKERS stated why did not the Germans, some of whom relaized that their Enigma Code Machine was far from infallible, did not adopt new dissimilar machines. Well his(Kahn's) answer was:"they did they not have another machine"
That is far from true.
The above are alternatives to Enigma: The Hitler-Muhle(Mill). Mill is German slang for 'typewriter'.
http://jproc.ca/crypto/menu.html
By checking out the website above you can see that a great many Crypto-code Machines using electromechanical technologies were available in World War Two and the code war. Variants of some of these machines were used right up the 70's in The West and til the 1980's in the Eastern Bloc countries(Warsaw Pact).
The machine pictured above is one example of the Hitler Mill, an encryption machine that could have replaced the Enigma entirely and made code breaking on the part of the British(Bletchly Park) much much more difficult.
Fellgiebel did not survive the war because he was implicated the July 20 plot and fell into the lethal hands of the Gestapo. Even without the benefit of Fellgiebel’s account, there is is reason to believe that he deliberately maintained Enigma as a compromised signals system in order to help bring down the Third Reich.
In addition, some of the apparent operation and security errors that helped made Enigma signals readable by the Allies were likely the deliberate work of other anti-Nazi German officers. A substitute for Enigma would have been vulnerable to such honorable sabotage and errors in signals security.
Moreover, a mere change in machines would not have transcended the fundamental limitations of German code technology and practices or counteracted the scope and sophistication of Allied code breaking efforts. Unrealized by the Germans, the Allies had attained analytical and computational advances that far outpaced Germany;s ability to develop and adopt secure code systems.
In the end, whether Nazi Germany used Enigma or some substitute machine, the Allies would probably have read German's wartime signals.
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Gods |
Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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In addition, some of the apparent operation and security errors that helped made Enigma signals readable by the Allies were likely the deliberate work of other anti-Nazi German officers. A substitute for Enigma would have been vulnerable to such honorable sabotage and errors in signals security.
Moreover, a mere change in machines would not have transcended the fundamental limitations of German code technology and practices or counteracted the scope and sophistication of Allied code breaking efforts. Unrealized by the Germans, the Allies had attained analytical and computational advances that far outpaced Germany;s ability to develop and adopt secure code systems.
In the end, whether Nazi Germany used Enigma or some substitute machine, the Allies would probably have read German's wartime signals.
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I think you are overstating the case there.
How did this ‘Fellgiebel’ even know that the Enigma had in fact been compromised?
Furthermore there were three separate inquiries into the the cryptographic security of the Enigma(to see if the German secret communiques had been breached, which many Nazis had suspected) and concluded that the Enigma was not at fault.
The British did not invent the Computer-—Colossus was not a computer. Just a pile of digtal circuitry dedicated to one purpose: Juxtapositioning of Lorenz code characters.
Finally I think you are grossly overstating the magnitude and effectability of the German Resistance.
There are many many reasons why the Germans/Nazis wholly adopted the Enigma to the exclusion of all else(Lorenz Cipher machines were only used by the German Army High Command)
Go read David Kahn’s book. It is a good read and very detailed.
>>Gods
Graves
Glyphs Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution.
To all — please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. <<
I do not understand, why have you posted this here?
From the publisher's description:
For the last 20 years books on the Allied effort in World War II have placed great emphasis on the fact that the Allies had broken the German "Enigma" codes and often had advance warning of German activities. For some years, knowledgeable researchers have felt that a counter-argument needed to be made, that perhaps undue emphasis had been placed on Allied code-breaking successes.
Kenneth Macksey here makes just such a counter-argument. A fresh study of the evidence leads Macksey to argue that anti-Hitler generals knew that Enigma had been broken and were playing a sophisticated double game to bring down the Nazi regime. Particular attention is given to the activities of General Erich Fellgiebel, head of German Army Signals, who was executed in the wake of the Hitler assassination plot.
How significant a contribution did the German anti-Hitler officers make toward Allied victory? Much of the evidence escapes the historical record or was suppressed. Even today, key files are still withheld under Britain's 75 year rule.
Here is one illustrative mystery. When, just before D-Day, the Germans issued the invasion alert for all of the north of France, Normandy was unaccountably left out, thus delaying the German response to the invasion by a few critical hours. Why? Could it have been because of anti-Nazi German Army officers? In the absence of other evidence, that seems the best explanation.
Similarly, there are instances in which Allied code breaking was facilitated by mistakes in Enigma security practices. Sometimes, the same message would be transmitted using both old and new code wheel and plug settings, or such settings would even be transmitted in violation of strict security protocols. Bone headed mistakes or sabotage? In the absence of proof, we are left to speculate.
Similarly, there are instances in which Allied code breaking was facilitated by mistakes in Enigma security practices. Sometimes, the same message would be transmitted using both old and new code wheel and plug settings, or such settings would even be transmitted in violation of strict security protocols. Bone headed mistakes or sabotage? In the absence of proof, we are left to speculate.
<<
Questions within questions. There are existing alternative explanations.
In time of combat the task of following highly complex cryptographic security procedures becomes to arduous to follow to the letter.
The Nazi's had been oversold on the infallibility of Enigma by its’ company reps.
In theory(but not in practice) Enigma was unbreakable in the short run.
As for undermining the Nazi's War Effort, Admiral Canaris was pivotal from the beginning.
As for this Macksey and this 75 year rule of secrecy, yes that create doubts, possibly whole new truths.
A scientist named Ivor Catt wrote a critical article(in ELECTRONICS WORLD) about the British boast that Colossus was the first computer(it wasn't a computer nor the first) he stated that the confusion and mystique about Bletchly Parks accomplishments are at least partly created by all the secrecy that lives on to this day.
The British are a cover-up society!
The Brits and us Americans created an elaborate ‘feint’ that involved the planting of a false information source.
They dressed up a dead man in Brit officers clothes and cuffed him with a brief case filled with lightly encrypted message indicating that our invasion would be at Calais, not Normandy.
There were other measures to further along this ruse.
Because I added it to the GGG catalog (as a WWII topic) but didn’t ping the list (because it’s a WWII topic). It’ll appear in the GGG Digest on Saturday.
>>Rommel’s HQs not issuing an invasion alert for Normandy has been attributed to foul weather and unfavorable tides, but the decision was apparently made by Hans Speidel, Rommel’s chief of staff. Speidel was an anti-Hitler plotter and I find it difficult to believe that did not play a role in the lack of an alert to Normandy. <<
Maybe so, but I believe that the Allies ‘feinting’ manuever was chiefly responsible for catching the Germans by suprise at Normandy beach.
We digress here very much! I wanted to discuss the encryption technologies of World War Two, the possibilities of what could have been done with newly emerging encoding technologiies. Also their ramifications for the post-war era.
Although, in concept, Lorenz was vastly superior to Enigma if the system of paper tapes with unique random code additives was used, this proved impractical in wartime so a pseudo random number generator had to be used. This made Lorenz vulnerable to Allied and even Swedish code breakers.
Here is an informative account:
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/fish.htm
The fundamental German disadvantage in signals security was that Allied code breaking capabilities were considerably beyond what was suspected. And when nascent suspicions arose, the anti-Nazi Fellgiebel squelched them.
German Cipher Machines of World War II, David Mowry, the Center for Cryptologic History, the National Security Agency
The author concludes:
The Germans had a good head start in the construction of mechanical cryptodevices before the beginning of World War II with Enigma, and developed excellent enciphered teleprinter devices . . . . [If Menzer’s devices] had been introduced in a timely manner from 1940 on, they would certainly have complicated the Allied cryptanalytic effort, which was strongly oriented toward solution of Enigma traffic from 1939 on. This is not to say that the Allies would not have been able to read German traffic. The Germans did not intend to replace the Enigma on higher echelon communications, and in the face of necessity, methods would have been found to solve Menzer.s devices. But the Allies would have lost the much of the edge that the Poles presented to the British in 1939, when they turned over the results of their analysis of the Enigma to GC&CS.
www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic.../german_cipher.pdf
Here is an informative account:
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/fish.htm
The fundamental German disadvantage in signals security was that Allied code breaking capabilities were considerably beyond what was suspected. And when nascent suspicions arose, the anti-Nazi Fellgiebel squelched them.
<<
A ‘UK’ domain, the British are hardly an objective source by any means.
But I get your point. The ONE TIME PADs and ONE TIME PRINTOUTs would not have been practical for military use.
Especially for U-Boats on long missions.
But ONE-TIME machines were used: The T-43, and ONE-TIME PADs
.
One of the big reasons the Germans chose these machines with their ‘pseudo-random code’ is that they lent themselves to mass production and portability. Obviously machines like Lorenz and the T-43 and the T-52(a very sophisticated machine) were neither.
I do not know enough about this ‘Fellgiebel’ to discount him, but I think you over-credit him. This man alone could not squelch all of those whom suspected and all of the suspicions of the Enigma Machine's fallibility. I think he is made out to be too powerful.
Are you suggesting that Fellgiebel worked in concert with the Allies thru middle agents(men or women)? That is what Canaris did with his mistress in Switzerland. He leaked info back to the Allies thru her.
Many publications from Britain(UK) have made the simple minded statement that the Germans/Nazis were to arrogant to concede that their encrypted coded xmissions were being broken and certainly not in real-time.
According to Ratzinger’s book(The Myth of Intelligence) there were many many reasons why the German, the Nazi's continued to relay on Enigma even after it became obvious that the Brits, the Allies were very good at second guessing their actions.
Many Germans blamed their misfortunes on the ‘Red Orchestra’ as a security/info leak.
Remember that the Enigma represented portability, reliability, durability and mass producibility(affordability).
Did these other machines offer these virtues ?
Because the Vernam system depended on addition of characters, Tiltman reasoned that if the operators made a mistake and used the same Lorenz machine starts for two messages (a depth), then by adding the two cipher texts together character by character, the obscuring character sequence would disappear. He would then be left with a sequence of characters each of which represented the addition of the two characters in the original German message texts. For two completely different messages it is virtually impossible to assign the correct characters to each message. Just small sections at the start could be derived but not complete messages.
The German mistake
As the number of intercepts, now being made at Knockholt in Kent, increased a section was formed in Bletchley Park headed by Major Ralph Tester and known as the Testery. A number of Depths were intercepted but not much headway had been made into breaking the cipher until the Germans made one horrendous mistake. It was on 30 August 1941. A German operator had a long message of nearly 4,000 characters to be sent from one part of the German Army High command to another — probably Athens to Vienna. He correctly set up his Lorenz machine and then sent a twelve letter indicator, using the German names, to the operator at the receiving end. This operator then set his Lorenz machine and asked the operator at the sending end to start sending his message. After nearly 4,000 characters had been keyed in at the sending end, by hand, the operator at the receiving end sent back by radio the equivalent, in German, of “didn't get that — send it again”.
They now both put their Lorenz machines back to the same start position. Absolutely forbidden, but they did it. The operator at the sending end then began to key in the message again, by hand. If he had been an automaton and used exactly the same key strokes as the first time then all the interceptors would have got would have been two identical copies of the cipher text. Input the same — machines generating the same obscuring characters — same cipher text. But being only human and being thoroughly disgusted at having to key it all again, the sending operator began to make differences in the second message compared to the first.
The message began with that well known German phrase SPRUCHNUMMER — “message number” in English. The first time the operator keyed in S P R U C H N U M M E R. The second time he keyed in S P R U C H N R and then the rest of the message text. Now NR means the same as NUMMER, so what difference did that make? It meant that immediately following the N the two texts were different. But the machines were generating the same obscuring sequence, therefore the cipher texts were different from that point on.
The interceptors at Knockholt realised the possible importance of these two messages because the twelve letter indicators were the same. They were sent post-haste to John Tiltman at Bletchley Park. Tiltman applied the same additive technique to this pair as he had to previous Depths. But this time he was able to get much further with working out the actual message texts because when he tried SPRUCHNUMMER at the start he immediately spotted that the second message was nearly identical to the first. Thus the combined errors of having the machines back to the same start position and the text being re-keyed with just slight differences enabled Tiltman to recover completely both texts. The second one was about 500 characters shorter than the first where the German operator had been saving his fingers. This fact also allowed Tiltman to assign the correct message to its original cipher text.
Now Tiltman could add together, character by character, the corresponding cipher and message texts revealing for the first time a long stretch of the obscuring character sequence being generated by this German cipher machine. He did not know how the machine did it, but he knew that this was what it was generating!
<<
I copied this from that site you posted.
Very elucidating.
But the claim that this machine was a computer is wrong.
It had many components of a digital computer, but the whole was far less than the some of its’ parts.
This machine did not computer; it did not perform extrapolations in algebraic logic. The Colossus machines were just Juxtaposers~ i.e. they were single function machines, hard wired for one purpose which they did so very well.
These machine had very limited programmability and even that was all hard wired, that is all were mechanical latches to arrange the constants.
>>The teleprinter signals being transmitted by the Germans, and enciphered using Lorenz, were first heard in early 1940 by a group of policemen on the South Coast who were listening out for possible German spy transmissions from inside the UK.
Brigadier John Tiltman, one of the top codebreakers in Bletchley Park, took a particular interest in these enciphered teleprinter messages. They were given the code name “Fish”. The messages which (as was later found out) were enciphered using the Lorenz machine, were known as “Tunny”. Tiltman knew of the Vernam system and soon identified these messages as being enciphered in the Vernam manner.
Because the Vernam system depended on addition of characters, Tiltman reasoned that if the operators made a mistake and used the same Lorenz machine starts for two messages (a depth), then by adding the two cipher texts together character by character, the obscuring character sequence would disappear. He would then be left with a sequence of characters each of which represented the addition of the two characters in the original German message texts. For two completely different messages it is virtually impossible to assign the correct characters to each message. Just small sections at the start could be derived but not complete messages.
The German mistake
As the number of intercepts, now being made at Knockholt in Kent, increased a section was formed in Bletchley Park headed by Major Ralph Tester and known as the Testery. A number of Depths were intercepted but not much headway had been made into breaking the cipher until the Germans made one horrendous mistake. It was on 30 August 1941. A German operator had a long message of nearly 4,000 characters to be sent from one part of the German Army High command to another — probably Athens to Vienna. He correctly set up his Lorenz machine and then sent a twelve letter indicator, using the German names, to the operator at the receiving end. This operator then set his Lorenz machine and asked the operator at the sending end to start sending his message. After nearly 4,000 characters had been keyed in at the sending end, by hand, the operator at the receiving end sent back by radio the equivalent, in German, of “didn’t get that — send it again”.
They now both put their Lorenz machines back to the same start position. Absolutely forbidden, but they did it. The operator at the sending end then began to key in the message again, by hand. If he had been an automaton and used exactly the same key strokes as the first time then all the interceptors would have got would have been two identical copies of the cipher text. Input the same — machines generating the same obscuring characters — same cipher text. But being only human and being thoroughly disgusted at having to key it all again, the sending operator began to make differences in the second message compared to the first.
The message began with that well known German phrase SPRUCHNUMMER — “message number” in English. The first time the operator keyed in S P R U C H N U M M E R. The second time he keyed in S P R U C H N R and then the rest of the message text. Now NR means the same as NUMMER, so what difference did that make? It meant that immediately following the N the two texts were different. But the machines were generating the same obscuring sequence, therefore the cipher texts were different from that point on.
The interceptors at Knockholt realised the possible importance of these two messages because the twelve letter indicators were the same. They were sent post-haste to John Tiltman at Bletchley Park. Tiltman applied the same additive technique to this pair as he had to previous Depths. But this time he was able to get much further with working out the actual message texts because when he tried SPRUCHNUMMER at the start he immediately spotted that the second message was nearly identical to the first. Thus the combined errors of having the machines back to the same start position and the text being re-keyed with just slight differences enabled Tiltman to recover completely both texts. The second one was about 500 characters shorter than the first where the German operator had been saving his fingers. This fact also allowed Tiltman to assign the correct message to its original cipher text.
Now Tiltman could add together, character by character, the corresponding cipher and message texts revealing for the first time a long stretch of the obscuring character sequence being generated by this German cipher machine. He did not know how the machine did it, but he knew that this was what it was generating!
<<
I copied this from that site you posted.
Very elucidating.
But the claim that this machine was a computer is wrong.
It had many components of a digital computer, but the whole was far less than the some of its’ parts.
This machine did not computer; it did not perform extrapolations in algebraic logic. The Colossus machines were just Juxtaposers~ i.e. they were single function machines, hard wired for one purpose which they did so very well.
These machine had very limited programmability and even that was all hard wired, that is all were mechanical latches to arrange the constants.
The Nazis had good reason to fear the “Red Orchestra,” which benefited from long standing communist training and recruitment for espionage and subversion. Supposedly, a clandestine “Red Orchestra” transmitter was active in Berlin almost until the end, and the British seem to have fed Ultra intelligence to the Soviets via a “Red Orchestra” “Lucy Ring” agent in Switzerland.
As with weapons development and much else, the Third Reich's record on communications security showed both brilliance and incompetence. Enigma was good enough at the start of the war, but it should have been replaced by a more secure system by the middle of the war. We must be grateful that was not the case.
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