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This was newly released under FOIA at my request: Victor C. Williams, Jr., Donn B. Parker, and Charles C. Wood, “Impacts of Federal Policy Options for Nonmilitary Cryptography,” NTIA-CR-81-10, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, US. Department of Commerce, June 1981. It argues that cryptography is an important enabling technology. At this point, it’s only of historical value.
This 1947 document describes a German machine to cryptanalyze the American
EDITED TO ADD (5/14): German attacks on the M-209.
This is an interesting historical use of Viking runes as a secret code. Yes, the page is all in Finnish. But scroll to the middle. There’s a picture of the Stockholm city police register from 1536, about a married woman who was found with someone who was not her husband. The recording scribe “encrypted” her name and home address using runes.
Jim Sanborn has given the world another clue to the fourth cyphertext in his Kryptos sculpture at the CIA headquarters.
Good article, with pictures, diagrams, and code.
The Voynich Manuscript has been partially decoded. This seems not to be a hoax. And the manuscript seems not to be a hoax, either.
Here’s the paper.
Elgar’s cryptography puzzles from the late 1890s.
“Talking to Vula” is the story of a 1980s secret communications channel between black South African leaders and others living in exile in the UK. The system used encrypted text encoded into DTMF “touch tones” and transmitted from pay phones.
Our next project was one that led to the breakthrough we had been waiting for. We had received a request, as members of the Technical Committee, to find a way for activists to contact each other safely in an urban environment. Ronnie had seen a paging device that could be used between users of walkie-talkies. A numeric keypad was attached to the front of each radio set and when a particular number was pressed a light would flash on the remote set that corresponded to the number. The recipient of the paging signal could then respond to the caller using a pre-determined frequency so that the other users would not know about it.
Since the numbers on the keypad actually generated the same tones as those of a touch-tone telephone it occurred to us that instead of merely having a flashing light at the recipient`s end you could have a number appear corresponding to the number pressed on the keypad. If you could have one number appear you could have all numbers appear and in this way send a coded message. If the enemy was monitoring the airwaves all they would hear was a series of tones that would mean nothing.
Taking this a step further we realised that if you could send the tones by radio then they could also be sent by telephone, especially as the tones were intended for use on telephone systems. Ronnie put together a little microphone device that – when held on the earpiece of the receiving telephone – could display whatever number was pressed at the sending end. Using touch-tone telephones or separate tone pads as used for telephone banking services two people could send each other coded messages over the telephone. This could be done from public telephones, thus ensuring the safety of the users.
To avoid having to key in the numbers while in a telephone booth the tones could be recorded on a tape recorder at home and then played into the telephone. Similarly, at the receiving end, the tones could be recorded on a tape recorder and then decoded later. Messages could even be sent to an answering machine and picked up from an answering machine if left as the outgoing message.
We gave a few of these devices, disguised as electronic calculators, to activists to take back to South Africa. They were not immensely successful as the coding still had to be done by hand and that remained the chief factor discouraging people from communicating.
The next step was an attempt to marry the tone communication system with computer encryption. Ronnie got one of the boffins at the polytechnic to construct a device that produced the telephone tones at very high speed. This was attached to a computer that did the encryption. The computer, through the device, output the encrypted message as a series of tones and these could be saved on a cassette tape recorder that could be taken to a public telephone. This seemed to solve the problem of underground communications as everything could be done from public telephones and the encryption was done by computer.
Lots more operational details in the article.
The 2013 Cryptologic History Symposium, sponsored by the NSA, will be held at Johns Hopkins University this October.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.