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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.
This is a neat story:
A pair of rare Enigma machines used in the Spanish Civil War have been given to the head of GCHQ, Britain’s communications intelligence agency. The machines – only recently discovered in Spain – fill in a missing chapter in the history of British code-breaking, paving the way for crucial successes in World War II.
Fun paragraphs:
A non-commissioned officer found the machines almost by chance, only a few years ago, in a secret room at the Spanish Ministry of Defence in Madrid.
“Nobody entered there because it was very secret,” says Felix Sanz, the director of Spain’s intelligence service.
“And one day somebody said ‘Well if it is so secret, perhaps there is something secret inside.’ They entered and saw a small office where all the encryption was produced during not only the civil war but in the years right afterwards.”
EDITED TO ADD (4/13): Blog comments from someone actually involved in the process.
The papers are old, but they have just been released under FOIA.
The history of coded messages in postage-stamp placement. I wonder how prevalent this actually was. My guess is that it was more a clever idea than an actual signaling system. And I notice that a lot of the code systems don’t have a placement that indicates “no message; this is just a stamp.”
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.