Code-Breakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes | Hacker News Reader

Code-Breakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes

bbc.co.uk

78 pointsjgrahamc24 comments

While we're on the topic of lost heroes, it seems appropriate to mention the Biuro Szyfrów (the Polish Cypher Bureau) and in particular Marian Rejewski. By applying permutation group theory he managed to crack the Enigma in 1932. In 1939 this information was handed over to the British and French, allowing Bletchley Park to begin deciphering the Enigma which they had little success with up to this point [1].

The bureau also developed the bomba kryptologiczna (cryptological bomb), a precursor of Bletchley Park's bombe, a device used to expedite the breaking of Enigma codes [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biuro_Szyfr%C3%B3w

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe

If you are into this sort of thing, I highly recommend The Codebreakers by David Kahn. Fascinating history of cryptography with good coverage of the WWII era.

I don't believe that book covers Lorenz.

Believe me when I say that this type of treatment happens all the time in the UK, some really amazing stuff is done here and generally there is no recognition whatsoever or classified the moment they are churned out. I think it has a lot to do with our limited resources, so ingenuity has to shine through.

It has do with paranoia and a government and civil services that have managed very nicely for 200years by automatically keeping all successes and failures secret.

GCHQ invented public key encryption in the 70s years before RSA. But instead of publishing it and making money for British companies and giving British citizens a way to keep their money safe they kept it secret. Note, that keeping the invention secret doesn't improve the security of any data encrypted with it.

They were given permission to publish it in the late 80s - a decade after it was making lots of money for R,S and A. But the permission was pulled at the last minute because the publishing of Spycatcher was proving embarrassing for the government and the natural knee jerk reaction was to keep everything - however tangentially related - secret again.

What was the name of the GCHQ cryptosystem? Any reference links?

The flip side of this is the Allied codemaking operation, which was a hell of a thing as well.

Between Silk and Cyanide is an account by Leo Marks, the man in charge of that effort. It's a fantastic read.

http://amzn.com/0684864223

Excellent BBC documentary about "the other" cipher at Bletchley Park: Lorenz (my personal favourite and precursor of modern cryptography).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_cipher

"Currently BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only, but all BBC iPlayer Radio programmes are available to you." Bleagh.

Seriously you are complaining about not having access to a resource that you have not paid taxes to support?

There are other ways to watch it...

I visited The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park last November with a small group from my University. Tony Sale, who lead the team that rebuilt Colossus, gave a talk about how the Tunny machine worked as well as Colossus and the rebuilding process. We also got a demo of Colossus in action, it was really pretty incredible.

If you live in the UK you should totally visit, they've got some really unique hardware running and everyone is so enthusiastic and wants to teach the visitors about computing.

http://www.tnmoc.org

And if you like that sort of thing you might like this old blog post of mine about application of Bayes Theorem to code breaking: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/07/bayes-bletchley-jn-25-and-modern...

I watched this last night and it was very good. Should have guessed that jgrahamc would post the link.

Is this a new documentary? I swear I've seen a documentary with the exact same title.

It's new.

There was a similar documentary featuring the memories of the remaining people a coupe of years ago - called "Station X" ? IIRC

I just watched it. It is a new documentary. But I have to say it was not as informative as many of the other bbc documentaries that I have seen. Lorenz, Tutt and company were new for me but there was not a lot of detail after the initial revelations.

It's a source of shame to me that Alan Turing was treated so appallingly during his lifetime; and that Bletchley Park has had to struggle for years to preserve important history.

I did my best on that: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/09/hello-john-its-gordon-brown.html

For which every geek, every Brit, and I dare say everyone on the planet aware of the great man is eternally grateful to you. Thanks again for doing what you did John.

Currently BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only

Can anyone point to an alternative source?

Just use one of the many vpn services - I like ukivpn.com but there's plenty more.

http://thepiratebay.org/search/code%20breakers/0/99/0

I watched this last night. It was brilliant.

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