Joan Clarke, Woman Who Cracked Enigma with Alan Turing | Hacker News Reader

Joan Clarke, Woman Who Cracked Enigma with Alan Turing

bbc.com

100 pointslentil_soup27 comments

>In 1939, Clarke was recruited into the Government Code and Cypher School

Sickening BBC propaganda, after all this years they still pretend Enigma was cracked in England :/

Yes, this woman cracked enigma single handedly, by enlisting in school in the same year British government receiver FULLY FUCKING CRACKED enigma model and mathematical description from Polish cryptographers (Zygalski, Rozycki and Rejewski).

That's interesting, I've never heard that before, do you have a reference? Thanks

German military texts enciphered on the Enigma machine were first broken by the Polish Cipher Bureau, beginning in December 1932. This success was a result of efforts by three Polish cryptologists, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, working for Polish military intelligence

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

Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Pol...

The 20 years between the wars were an amazing time in Poland. It was perhaps the best time in Polish history of mathematics, with remarkable contributions from Stefan Banach and his other Lvov friends: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Banach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lw%C3%B3w_School_of_Mathematics

Read any book on the history in question - it's no secret that the Poles were responsible for working out the details of the Enigma machines and how to break them. The British took their work and developed it into methods that were more general & powerful. Wikipedia is a good as place to start as any - follow the references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma.

Yes agreed, but execution and exploitation matter.

The practical requirements to make a difference required a concerted network of interception stations along with dedicated cryptanalytic resources, computing experts and translators. I agree the standard explanation is crap, but it doesn't reduce the actual accomplishment of BP.

What I found even more sickening: polish cryptographers were in England for most of WW2, but were not trusted enough to decipher anything.

Polish cryptographers in England during WW2 were massively, massively vulnerable to coercion by Axis agents; they had family and friends in Axis-occupied Poland, and the Axis powers were not at all squeamish about murdering Poles. Even that aside, it was impossible to do any kind of security review of them as all the information about them that was needed had either been destroyed by the German and Soviet invasion of Poland, or was in a records office in aforementioned Axis-occupied Poland.

Considering Polish cryptographers in England a security risk wasn't sickening; it was sensible.

Enigma was cracked many times, because Enigma changed, there were many versions, and more importantly procedures of using Enigma were different in different German army branches.

Poles first cracked only some versions, and only if Enigma was misused (which was common because it was convenient), then they improved the method, cracking more difficult version, and making the method more general.

Poles also built the first machine to crack Enigma (functionaly it was many enigma clones connected to each other, trying many keys at once basing on some assumptions to reduce the search space).

Then Poles sent that knowledge to French and British just before WW2, and British developed more general method, and built better cracking device.

British contribution was important too, it made cracking more versions and Enigmas used with better practices possible. But yes - it was outrageus that they pretended for decades it was they that solved the Enigma in the first place and said nothing about Polish contribution.

And the Hollywood movie was even worse propaganda, and it was created recently, when the archives weren't secret, so they don't have any excuse to show lies.

Monkey Dust's take on mainstream 'historical' films is pretty good. Here's their version of 'The Diary of Ann Frank' - http://www.vidivodo.com/video/monkey-dust-ann-frank/166592

I am with you completely over British propaganda about the war. Also I think our simplified portrayal of the conflict feeds the existence of groups like UKIP as you cannot venerate the British armed forces in the world wars and at the same time denigrate immigrants, unless you have absolutely no idea of history.

For instance, if you look at lists of fighter aces and check the nationality of those who are counted as having flown in the RAF, over half of them are not from the UK. Polish pilots make up a huge chunk of them and the highest ranking RAF ace was Belgian.

I wonder how many poles will appear in the upcoming movie.

One, that will turn out to be traitor, like in the previous one :/

Who will be played by someone Scottish in a bad Russian accent.

You are being simplistic and nationalistic.

Hugh Foss first outlined an attack on Enigma in 1927. By the 30s the enigma had evolved but Dilly Knox broke Enigma as used by the Spanish in 1937 before he learnt of the Polish attacks in 1938. (He had declared the German enigma unbreakable but that doesn't make his contribution trivial.) Knox later created attacks particular to the Italian naval enigma.

Turing is often credited with the lion share of fame for this stuff and its true that he was crucial in breaking german naval enigma which was the hardest used. But that pales into insignificance compared to the breaking of Tunny IMHO.

Any popular story is bound to focus on the people and their love lives more than be a technical piece.

Go to Bletchley Park and bathe in the credit clearly given to all those involved - especially the Poles - as people and not as nationalities.

Yup, Enigma was a side-show, the main deal was Colossus and the work to crack Tunny. The fact that Tunny had been cracked was a highly classified secret for decades after the war - I've always felt that the Enigma story was used as a cover to hide what Bletchley Park had really been up to, secrets within secrets.

You're right that the title is misleading to the point of being wrong. Enigma wasn't cracked at Bletchley, it was cracked by Polish mathematicians.

You may be right about it being propaganda but I suspect it's more of a case of a sub-editor not really knowing what he/she is talking about.

The rest of the article, at least, seems ok in that it talks about her working on decipherment of the Naval codes which is true, I believe.

I do appreciate your sentiment though. I don't think it diminishes the achievements at Bletchley to highlight the value they received from others, particularly the key early work of the Polish.

Exciting that a film is coming out about a female mathematician. Are there any other examples in popular culture?

Here is some more info about other British female cryptographers: http://www.bletchleyparkresearch.co.uk/research-notes/women-...

Also exciting that a film is finally made about Alan Turing -- the BBC's "Breaking the Code" notwithstanding.

It may be common knowledge now, but Alan Turing's sexuality was not even mentioned when we learned about him in computer science in the 80's. I hope Andrew Hodges is proud of this work.

Reality is generally more complicated than the simple narratives that make sense to people. Binary sexuality is a nice story.

In a similar way, technical contributions often have a more storied history than is really acknowledged. The kinds of people who get credit tend be those who want it.

This comment seems pretty reasonable to me, any downvoters want to say what it is they find objectionable about it?

"Binary sexuality is a nice story."

PONG

Holy shit, a Keira Knightley movie about Alan Turing... 2014: the year cryptography went mainstream..

> Joan Clarke, Woman Who Cracked Enigma with Alan Turing

Only - Joan and Alan didn't crack Enigma. Worked on it yeah. Made improvements sure. But cracked it - no.

A child can learn in 2 minutes that the Poles cracked Enigma. Why would the BBC distort? Why would HN highlight these distortions?

"Alan Turing ... provided much of the original thinking that led to the design of the cryptanalytical Bombe machines and the eventual breaking of naval Enigma" - Wikipedia

Apparently the German army Enigma was cracked because they didn't have rigorous procedures, didn't rotate keys as often as they should. The German Navy had strict discipline and it took Turing et. al. to crack the math before those dispatches could be read.

Exactly, as has been pointed out above Different use patterns and protocols for Enigma encoding used by different branches of the German military were cracked at different times by different people and teams.

The reason Bletchley Park is so famous is for three reasons. One is it cracked the most rigorous and hardest to crack variants of Enigma. Another is that is used forerunners of modern computers to do so and Alan in particular laid some of the theoretical foundations for modern computer systems. Finally it's because cracking the German Navy code basically saved Britain from strangulation by the U-Boat blockade.

Yes Poles cracke Enigma first and this provided valuable intelligence, but their explot would not have worked against the Navy variants and would not have made any difference to the Battle of the Atlantic.

> Why would HN highlight these distortions?

So that you and others that already knew better could come here and educate us that didn't. Thank you.

This movie is full of BS.

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