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The last cryptanalyst at the Battle of Midway, Rear Admiral Donald “Mac” Showers, USN-Ret, passed away 19 October 2012. His interment at Arlington National Cemetery at Arlington, Virginia, will be Monday, April 15, at 3:00. The family made this a public event to celebrate his life and contributions to the cryptologic community.
Two puzzles from a 1977 issue of Cryptolog.
The NSA has published declassified versions of its Cryptolog newsletter. All the issues from Aug 1974 through Summer 1997 are on the web, although there are some pretty heavy redactions in places. (Here’s a link to the documents on a non-government site, in case they disappear.)
I haven’t even begun to go through these yet. If you find anything good, please post it in comments.
A Canadian claims that the message is based on a WWII codebook. A spokesman from GCHQ remains dubious, but says they’ll be happy to look at the proposed solution.
EDITED TO ADD (1/14): The backstory. Skepticism about the alleged deciphering.
Not the sort of pairing I normally think of, but:
Robin Ince and Brian Cox are joined on stage by comedian Dave Gorman, author and Enigma Machine owner Simon Singh and Bletchley Park enthusiast Dr Sue Black as they discuss secret science, code-breaking and the extraordinary achievements of the team working at Bletchley during WW II.
Audio here.
Another historical cipher, this one from the 1600s, has been cracked:
Senior math major Lucas Mason-Brown, who has done the majority of the decoding, said his first instinct was to develop a statistical tool. The 21-year-old from Belmont, Mass., used frequency analysis, which looks at the frequency of letters or groups of letters in a text, but initially didn’t get far.
He picked up critical clues after learning Williams had been trained in shorthand as a court stenographer in London, and built his own proprietary shorthand off an existing system. Mason-Brown refined his analysis and came up with a rough key.
Williams’ system consisted of 28 symbols that stand for a combination of English letters or sounds. How they’re arranged is key to their meaning; arrange them one way and you get one word, arrange them another, you get something different. One major complication, according to Mason-Brown: Williams often improvised.
Great story, both the cryptanalysis process and the Oculists.
EDITED TO ADD (12/13): This is a follow-up to a previous post. More here.
Expensive, but it’s in complete working order. They’re also auctioning off a complete set of rotors; those are even rarer than the machines—which are often missing their rotors.
I’d sure like to know more about this:
Government code-breakers are working on deciphering a message that has remained a secret for 70 years.
It was found on the remains of a carrier pigeon that was discovered in a chimney, in Surrey, having been there for decades.
It is thought the contents of the note, once decoded, could provide fresh information from World War II.
It was a British pigeon, presumed to have died while heading back to Bletchley Park.
Some more articles. Additional video.
ETA (11/5): Another article, and Bletchley Park news release.
ETA (11/6): And another.
I look forward to seeing the decryption.
EDITED TO ADD (11/25): GCHQ can’t decrypt it. They think that it’s either a one-time pad or a unique codebook.
GCHQ, the UK government’s communications headquarters, has released two new—well, 70 years old, but new to us—cryptanalysis documents by Alan Turing.
The papers, one entitled The Applications of Probability to Crypt, and the other entitled Paper on the Statistics of Repetitions, discuss mathematical approaches to code breaking.
[…]
According to the GCHQ mathematician, who identified himself only as Richard, the papers detailed using “mathematical analysis to try and determine which are the more likely settings so that they can be tried as quickly as possible.”
The papers don’t seem to be online yet, but here’s their National Archives data.
EDITED TO ADD (5/12): The papers are available for download at GBP 3.50 each.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.