Story Monday August 1, 2016

[The Old Hack 2,448]

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Their codes were actually good for that period. It wasn't their fault Brits have Alan "the universal machine & the AI test" Turing. (Also several others, but Turing is really VERY known.)

The problem is, the radios were so bad that sometimes the German soldiers just said 'Verflucht', gave up and transmitted in plain speech to have just a chance of being understood by the people they were talking to. And when the people listening in on you have better radios than you do, well...

[mlooney 3,417]

5 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Their codes were actually good for that period. It wasn't their fault Brits have Alan "the universal machine & the AI test" Turing. (Also several others, but Turing is really VERY known.)

The fact their radios were so crappy they had to send the coded message 3 times, with a header that indicated how the wheel were to be set.  That helps a code cracker a lot.

[Don Edwards 548]

Also, the Germans were using some special machines for encryption. These machines (at least some of them) were built by Polish* slave labor. The laborers systematically smuggled parts and assembly instructions out to the Polish Resistance for shipment to England.

The Allies put considerable effort and ingenuity into concealing how easily they could read German encrypted communications... and sometimes were left with no better alternative than let some troops be slaughtered by an attack they knew was coming and could have countered. (On the other hand, on another occasion they did something that blatantly showed they had advance information... and then had a diplomat in Switzerland, whom the Germans knew was a spy for the Allies, send a gift to one of Germany's better generals "in thanks for his assistance". A few days later the general disappeared.)

In one of Neal Stephenson's books there's a US Army unit whose mission is to apparently be the source for information actually gained by other means.

* I think it was Polish. Not absolutely certain.

[hkmaly 490]

20 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

Also, the Germans were using some special machines for encryption. These machines (at least some of them) were built by Polish* slave labor.

The machines were called Enigma and Polish cryptologists broke them before they were enslaved. Of course, Germans then upgraded the machines, but it was still useful, as Polish explained everything they found to Brits. I didn't find any note about any parts being smuggled out after the start of war on wikipedia ...

[ijuin 572]

The Enigma had a number of weaknesses to its design that were unimportant when codebreakers were doing everything the slow way with pencil and paper, but that proved fatal when the Allies invented electronic computers capable of operating hundreds of times faster than humans. Most famously, the text characters were always swapped around such that no character was EVER mapped to itself (i.e. you could be certain that the letter "a" in the cypertext was NEVER an "a" in the plaintext, and the same for "b", "c", etc.). This drastically reduced the keyspace to a small fraction of what would have been available if any character could have been anything whatsoever without restriction (i.e. true pseudorandomization).

[mlooney 3,417]

35 minutes ago, ijuin said:

The Enigma had a number of weaknesses to its design that were unimportant when codebreakers were doing everything the slow way with pencil and paper, but that proved fatal when the Allies invented electronic computers capable of operating hundreds of times faster than humans. Most famously, the text characters were always swapped around such that no character was EVER mapped to itself (i.e. you could be certain that the letter "a" in the cypertext was NEVER an "a" in the plaintext, and the same for "b", "c", etc.). This drastically reduced the keyspace to a small fraction of what would have been available if any character could have been anything whatsoever without restriction (i.e. true pseudorandomization).

We could start posting in Enigma coding!  There is at least one web based simulator out there.

OPGN DXCR WOMU IQOI NRSP LNQB KBZK

Of course the fact that it mangles spaces and reduces every thing to 4 letter code groups might, in and of it's self make life tricky.

[hkmaly 490]

17 hours ago, mlooney said:

OPGN DXCR WOMU IQOI NRSP LNQB KBZK

I'm pretty sure it's too short to even start doing cryptoanalysis on it.

[mlooney 3,417]

I'll give you a hint.  It's the most common first sentence used in verifying an encryption system and the second is the classic code ring message.

[Cpt. Obvious 73]

On den 6 augusti 2016 at 2:24 AM, hkmaly said:

Their codes were actually good for that period. It wasn't their fault Brits have Alan "the universal machine & the AI test" Turing. (Also several others, but Turing is really VERY known.)

Turing wasn't the sole reason they managed to break all those codes, but he was important. This didn't help saving him from being prosecuted for homosexual acts in 1952 and being forced to go through chemical castration. A few years later he died from cyanide poisoning. It was determined to be suicide.

That was a very sad end for a brilliant man, and not a shining moment in the history of Great Britain. In GB homosexuality between two adults of the age of 21 years or more was illegal up until 1956, and if you wanted to bring a third partner into the bedroom and stay legal you had to wait until 2003... So while I'm glad Alan was around to help with breaking those cryptos, he would probably have had a happier life if he had been born some forty years later, and possibly still be alive...
 

[ijuin 572]

10 hours ago, mlooney said:

I'll give you a hint.  It's the most common first sentence used in verifying an encryption system and the second is the classic code ring message.

Drink Your Ovaltine?

[mlooney 3,417]

1 hour ago, ijuin said:

Drink Your Ovaltine?

Close

This is a test drink more ovaltine

[Sjmcc13 42]

On 8/1/2016 at 3:09 PM, PSadlon said:

Remind me to never play a tabletop RPG vs Pandora.

I would half like to see her playing Paranoia, or GMing a Paranoia session

[hkmaly 490]

11 hours ago, Cpt. Obvious said:

So while I'm glad Alan was around to help with breaking those cryptos, he would probably have had a happier life if he had been born some forty years later, and possibly still be alive...

... unless his help was important enough that if he would be born 40 years later it would be under Third Empire. Or with radiation poisoning.

11 hours ago, Cpt. Obvious said:

This didn't help saving him from being prosecuted for homosexual acts in 1952 and being forced to go through chemical castration.

... I have better idea. Let's visit him in 1951 and take him to 1961. That shouldn't make any negative change in history.

 

[ijuin 572]

10 hours ago, mlooney said:

Close

This is a test drink more ovaltine

Well, when you said "classic code ring message", I figured it had to involve Ovaltine.