Here is an interesting article entitled, “PC beats Second World War British computer in cracking Nazi code“.
A rebuilt Second World War code-cracking computer developed to intercept Nazi messages has lost to a desktop computer today in a contest to decipher an encrypted radio message.
During WW2, the Nazis were communicating via radio using coded messages. The coded messages were encrypted by a series of machines that evolved in their complexity. By the end of the war they were using the most sophisticated of these machines, the Lorenz SZ42 cipher machine.
Meanwhile, the allied forces were developing machines to crack the code. This is from the very interesting Bletchley Park website.
The first machine designed to break the Lorenz was built at the Post Office research department at Dollis Hill and called ‘Heath Robinson’ after the cartoonist designer of fantastic machines. Although Heath Robinson worked well enough to show that Max Newman’s concepts were correct, it was slow and unreliable.
Max Newman called in the help of Tommy Flowers, a brilliant Post Office Electronics Engineer. Flowers went on to design and build ‘Colossus’, a much faster and more reliable machine that used 1,500 thermionic valves (vacuum tubes). The first Colossus machine arrived at Bletchley in December 1943. This was the world’s first practical electronic digital information processing machine - a forerunner of today’s computers.
Lorenz had to be cracked by carrying out compex statistical analyses on the intercepted messages. Colossus could read paper tape at 5,000 characters per second and the paper tape in its wheels travelled at 30 miles per hour. This meant that the huge amount of mathematical work that needed to be done could be
carried out in hours, rather than weeks.Mark I Colossus was upgraded to a Mark II in June 1944, and was working in time for Eisenhower and Montgomery to be sure that Hitler had swallowed the deception campaigns prior to D-Day on June 6th 1944. There were eventually 10 working Colossus machines at Bletchley Park.
The 10 original Colossus machines, which were located at Bletchley Park, enabled code breakers to decrypt top-secret communications sent by German high command, leading to the war being shortened by many months and saving thousands of lives.
Here is a photo of Colossus X.
Winston Churchill ordered the destruction all 10 of the Colossus machines following the war.
A team at Bletchley Park recently completed a remarkable rebuild of one of the Colossus machines and they decided to test it.
On November 15/16 2007, the rebuild of Colossus at Bletchley Park was celebrated in a Cipher Event organised by Tony Sale, curator of the British National Museum of Computing, who also headed the Colossus rebuild project. Messages encrypted with a historic Lorenz SZ42 cipher machine were transmitted form the ham radio station at the Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn to receiving stations in in Great Britain. The rebuilt Colossus machine was to perform the code breaking tasks using the historic methods.
The announcement of the Cipher Event stated that “At the same time as the international team receives the enciphered messages, radio amateurs around the world will be able to receive the same radio broadcasts and try their hand at decrypting it. It will be fascinating to see who completes the job first!”. As a radio amateur (callsign: DL2KCD) I was intreagued by this challenge. Hams have a culture of contesting. The outstanding work of the cryptographers at Bletchley Park was also important from nowadays point of view in Germany, as it helped to shorten the lifetime of the Nazi dictatorship. Therefore the Cipher Event deserves attention also from this country.
The above is from the website of Joachim Schueth. Schueth is the man who designed the software and broke the code with his own desktop computer.
The rebuilt Colossus cracked the code as well. It took a little longer, they had to replace a tube.
So, congratulations to both Mr. Schueth and the team at Bletchley Park on their contributions to a celebration of ingenuity.
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Tags: Bletchley Park, Colossus, Joachim Schueth, Lorenz SZ42
Patrick wrote,
So, what were the messages? I worked with Japanese at one job. I used to have lunch with Suzuki, who asked me things English. I asked him things Japanese. Over time we both realized that each other’s language was too difficult. It was not the actual languages, rather the idioms, slang, and sarcasm that makes English and Japanese difficult to hear.
After three years Suzuki was laughing with the best of us at tom-foolery and jokes American style. The offices were in Chicago suburb, and most all the area residents spoke understandable English. Unfortunately I never picked up any Japanese.
About that time I started my plan to return to deep south, Houston. I tried ot explain to Suzuki how southerners in fifth ward Houston speak. I now know that Japanese will never settle in Pearland, TX., or South Houston. It would send them into culture shock and seizures. “That’s my two cents worth…” and if I ever had said that to Suzuki he would have looked at me trustingly, yet alarmed, and waited for translation.
This in my opinion makes those machines even the more miraculous. Encryption is like sliding a note, or a tenor tremolo that actually blends with the chorus. Taking away encrypted noise, well that is one for minds much more attuned than mine. Yo’ >pd
Patrick’s last blog post..Show Me the Stardust! Subjectivity of Music: Record you guys, RECORD! More Recordings, Now!
Link | January 31st, 2008 at 6:00 pm