Entries Tagged "history of cryptography"

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Enigma Machine for Sale on eBay

A World War II German Enigma machine (three-rotor version) is for sale on eBay right now. At this writing, there have been about 60 bids, and the current price is $20K. This is below the reserve price, which means that the machine won’t sell until it reaches that (secret) price.

It’s expensive, but probably worth it. The Enigma looks like it’s in perfect condition—the seller claims “full working condition with extra lamps”—and includes the manual. All five rotors are included: three in the machine and the other two in a box. The three-rotor version is the most common, but it’s still very rare.

Of course I’d like it for myself—I have a three-rotor Enigma, but it’s missing all its rotors and some of its lamps—but not at that price.

And we can’t see who’s bidding, either. Recently eBay made a change in how it displays auction bids: it hides bidder identities when the auction price gets high. This is to combat “second chance fraud,” where a fraudster contacts a buyer who lost an auction and offers him the same article at the slightly lower losing price, then disappears after receiving payment.

The auction closes in eight days. Good luck.

EDITED TO ADD (7/19): The listing as been pulled; eBay doesn’t say why. The price was $25K after 64 bids when I last saw it; the price was still below the reserve.

EDITED TO ADD (7/20): It’s been relisted. The seller says that the other auction was taking down because of a “problem with pictures” (odd, because the new pictures don’t seem different), and that the reserve price of $28K was met. You can “buy it now” for $50K, or make your best offer. I’m really curious what the final price for this will be—I don’t think it’s worth anywhere near $50K.

EDITED TO ADD (7/20): Sold for $30K. I don’t know why the seller decided to use this alternate eBay system, instead of relisting it as an auction. My guess is that he could have gotten more than $30K if he let the auction run its course over the week.

Posted on July 19, 2007 at 4:45 PM • View Comments

Rudyard Kipling As a Security Author

A review of Kim:

Kipling packed a great deal of information and concept into his stories, and in “Kim” we find The Great Game: espionage and spying. Within the first twenty pages we have authentication by something you have, denial of service, impersonation, stealth, masquerade, role- based authorization (with ad hoc authentication by something you know), eavesdropping, and trust based on data integrity. Later on we get contingency planning against theft and cryptography with key changes.

The book is out of copyright, so you can read it online.

Posted on December 29, 2006 at 2:11 PM • View Comments

David Kahn Donates his Cryptology Library

According to The New York Times:

The National Cryptologic Museum, at Fort Meade, Md., home of thousands of code-breaking and code-making artifacts dating back to the 1500s, has acquired a major collection of books on codes and ciphers, the museum said. It was donated by David Kahn, a leading American scholar of cryptology and the author of “The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing.” The collection includes “Polygraphiae Libri Sex” (1518) by Johannes Trithemius, the first known printed book on cryptology, along with notes of interviews with modern cryptologists, memos, photocopies and pamphlets. About a dozen items from the collection are currently on display.

Posted on November 24, 2006 at 7:55 AM • View Comments

A Million Random Digits

The Rand Corporation published A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates back in 1955, when generating random numbers was hard.

The random digits in the book were produced by rerandomization of a basic table generated by an electronic roulette wheel. Briefly, a random frequency pulse source, providing on the average about 100,000 pulses per second, was gated about once per second by a constant frequency pulse. Pulse standardization circuits passed the pulses through a 5-place binary counter. In principle the machine was a 32-place roulette wheel which made, on the average, about 3000 revolutions per trial and produced one number per second. A binary-to-decimal converter was used which converted 20 of the 32 numbers (the other twelve were discarded) and retained only the final digit of two-digit numbers; this final digit was fed into an IBM punch to produce finally a punched card table of random digits.

I have a copy of the original book; it’s one of my library’s prize possessions. I had no idea that the book was reprinted in 2002; it’s available on Amazon. But even if you don’t buy it, go to the Amazon page and read the user reviews. They’re hysterical.

This is what I said in Applied Cryptography:

The meat of the book is the “Table of Random Digits.” It lists them in five-digit groups—”10097 32533 76520 13586 …”—50 on a line and 50 lines on a page. The table goes on for 400 pages and, except for a particularly racy section on page 283 which reads “69696,” makes for a boring read.

Posted on October 13, 2006 at 12:12 PM • View Comments

Indexes to NSA Publications Declassified and Online

In May 2003, Michael Ravnitzky submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the National Security Agency for a copy of the index to their historical reports at the Center for Cryptologic History and the index to certain journals: the NSA Technical Journal and the Cryptographic Quarterly. These journals had been mentioned in the literature but are not available to the public. Because he thought NSA might be reluctant to release the bibliographic indexes, he also asked for the table of contents to each issue.

The request took more than three years for them to process and declassify—sadly, not atypical—and during the process they asked if he would accept the indexes in lieu of the tables of contents pages: specifically, the cumulative indices that included all the previous material in the earlier indices. He agreed, and got them last month. The results are here.

This is just a sampling of some of the article titles from the NSA Technical Journal:

“The Arithmetic of a Generation Principle for an Electronic Key Generator” · “CATNIP: Computer Analysis – Target Networks Intercept Probability” · “Chatter Patterns: A Last Resort” · “COMINT Satellites – A Space Problem” · “Computers and Advanced Weapons Systems” · “Coupon Collecting and Cryptology” · “Cranks, Nuts, and Screwballs” · “A Cryptologic Fairy Tale” · “Don’t Be Too Smart” · “Earliest Applications of the Computer at NSA” · “Emergency Destruction of Documents” · “Extraterrestrial Intelligence” · “The Fallacy of the One-Time-Pad Excuse” · “GEE WHIZZER” · “The Gweeks Had a Gwoup for It” · “How to Visualize a Matrix” · “Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages” · “A Mechanical Treatment of Fibonacci Sequences” · “Q.E.D.- 2 Hours, 41 Minutes” · “SlGINT Implications of Military Oceanography” · “Some Problems and Techniques in Bookbreaking” · “Upgrading Selected US Codes and Ciphers with a Cover and Deception Capability” · “Weather: Its Role in Communications Intelligence” · “Worldwide Language Problems at NSA”

In the materials the NSA provided, they also included indices to two other publications: Cryptologic Spectrum and Cryptologic Almanac.

The indices to Cryptologic Quarterly and NSA Technical Journal have indices by title, author and keyword. The index to Cryptologic Spectrum has indices by author, title and issue.

Consider these bibliographic tools as stepping stones. If you want an article, send a FOIA request for it. Send a FOIA request for a dozen. There’s a lot of stuff here that would help elucidate the early history of the agency and some interesting cryptographic topics.

Thanks Mike, for doing this work.

Posted on September 26, 2006 at 12:58 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.