The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
In WWII, the Germans had their turn at incompetence. Enigma machines were supposed to be "warmed up" by 3 random characters. The purpose of this is like an Initial Vector or a "nonce" in modern block cipher use -- a bit of entropy to help obscure often almost identical message headers. A lot of German code clerks were lazy and just typed in "AAA", which helped out the Bletchley Park cryptographers a lot.
Modern crypto technology is often very good, but only if used correctly. Security fails most often because of human error. (This includes programmers!)
During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Admiral Halsey moved his massive Third fleet out of position to chase a Japanese ruse. The Japanese then moved their Central Force through the gap and attacked the much smaller and ill-prepared Seventh Fleet.
The commander of the Seventh Fleet sent several desperate messages asking for Halsey's help, causing Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor to send a message to Halsey asking, simply "WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR?" (Task Force 34 was the Third Fleet's detachment of battleships).
His clerk changed the message to WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR? And then, while forming the message, added the beginning nonce "TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG" and the trailing nonce "RR THE WORLD WONDERS". The "GG" and "RR" were indicators of the end and beginning of the nonces.
Halsey's clerk removed the first nonce, but left the last one "THE WORLD WONDERS" as part of the message, apparently missing the "RR". So when Halsey got the message, it read "WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR THE WORLD WONDERS".
Halsey interpreted the message as sarcastic criticism of his decisions by a commanding officer over official channels, and flew into a rage. He then decided to delay the Third Fleet's assistance of the Seventh Fleet, ostensibly to refuel his destroyers.
Had he sent the battleships immediately, they likely would have crossed the Central Force's T and crushed them. It would have been one of the greatest (and last) battleship duels in history.
Of course the blunder didn't affect the outcome of the war, or even the battle in a strategic since. The Seventh Fleet was able to turn the Central Force back, mostly through self-sacrificial courage on the part of the destroyer crews.
I know of that action from documentaries. Basically, the destroyers engaged heavier ship classes which they theoretically had no hope against. In some cases, "charged" is actually more apt than "engaged."
There was one story of an Afrika corp operator who sent HIT - LER as the 2 'secret' triplets every day for the entire North Africa campaign. Then disastrously he was captured!
It's an interesting question as to whether at least the best (4-wheel naval) system could be cracked without operator error or deliberate plain text seeding.
The only flaw of the enigma is that a letter cannot be encrypted to itself - I have heard different accounts of if this was enough to always make it crackable.
All crypto systems fail when faced with human operators!
One of the main failings of the Germans was their love of formal introductions and sign offs in official messages, especially by the navy which otherwise had rather better crypto than the other branches. However if you are already stuck with a language that has a very fixed word and sentence structure you don't help by signing all your messages with the same 40 character long formal greeting.
The way we think about ciphers has almost completely changed with the advent of cheap computation. Also, I read that book in High School and haven't thought much about Enigma in about 16 years, so it's entirely possible I got that a bit wrong.
However if you are already stuck with a language that has a very fixed word and sentence structure you don't help by signing all your messages with the same 40 character long formal greeting.
So, if you want to keep secrets, it doesn't pay to have a stick up your...
Another way to put it: it pays to be more like Snoop Dogg and less like Colonel Klink.
[1] If you can find it somewhere for a fair price, http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-German-Machine-Foreign-intellig...
http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/museum/index.s...
which is outside the NSA headquarters. They have old Enigma machines, which are quite compact, about typewriter size, as well as a decoder, which is more like a bank of refrigerators. And a lot of other artifacts. It seemed to be mainly a labor of love by retirees and crypto geeks, rather than some officially compiled museum. Rather touching, in a surprising way.
Fortitude was a very complicated operation (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude, it even involved faking two entire fictitious armies :D) but executed brilliantly - one of my favourite pieces of war history.
And he did it so successfully we were forced to invade.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Al-Anfal_Camp...
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Iraq_and_weap...
I'd argue that that constitutes a failure mode...
So the Brits could have sent a message ordering a few panzer armies from Normandy to the Pas de Calais. It doesn't seem that this was ever done - presumably because it gave the game away.
Even more interestingly - the Brits kept secret that they had cracked enigma into the 1980s because after the war they distributed the 'uncrackable' German code machine to lots of rather gullible allies
Saw it in a theater when I was a lad -- too young to properly appreciate Eva Marie Saint, alas.
http://www.archive.org/details/Inside_the_Third_Reich_Albert...
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Third-Reich-Albert-Speer/dp/068...
I've heard that JFK was a big fan of "The Guns of August", and made it required reading in his cabinet.
As an aside, Tuchman is now recognized for the following reflection, which is often paraphrased as Tuchman's Law: "Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena."
Oh, BTW: On the topic of encryption, I can't believe the Russians were sending unencrypted orders in WWI over wireless!
Well worth reading the book by the same name.
Somebody needs to make a movie about this man.
This work won the Goya (Spanish National Cinema Award) last year for better documentary.
I read the article and thought: "At least, some british recognition to Pujol" :-)
Am I missing something?
In short, the Navy, specifically U boats, used a non-standard, stronger crypto (in this, more rotors) Enigma machine, called M4. They formed their own Enigma network called "Triton" which the allies called "Shark".
Due to their hardening, and less message sent for traffic analysis, these machines were "safer" against cryptanalysis.
In any case, there are now (finally!) software implementations that are significantly faster than the reproduced hardware Collossus, so even if I'm not fully right brute-forcing messages should be viable.
Phew.