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It took 33 years before it was publicly announced that GCHQ succeeded in deciphering Enigma codes. Every single time they used intercepted intelligence to thei

It took 33 years before it was publicly announced that GCHQ succeeded in deciphering Enigma codes. Every single time they used intercepted intelligence to their benefit, they made sure to leave false trails of other ways they could've known so the Germans wouldn't suspect. I would expect the NSA could hide it well.

WalterBright 10y ago
I am still surprised that the Japanese and Germans did not figure out their codes had been broken. The disaster of the U-boot campaign was pretty good evidence of that, if nothing else. Besides, expecting a widely used and deployed cryptosystem to be uncompromised for years is absurd. They should have assumed it would be broken, and developed regular replacements.
- antman 10y ago
  They organized airplane flyovers that "saw" the U-boats. The Germans did not know how many aircrafts were patrolling and whether it was a high or low probability of being spotted. If the British could not organize a parallel construction they simply let it go. They knew the plan for Crete invasion but they could not create a story on how they learned it so they preferred to lose naval control of the large part of the eastern Mediterranean sea. [0] [0] https://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Secret-Service-David-Stafford/dp/1909609137 https://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Secret-Service-David-Staffo...
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    The sub killers were waiting at meeting points for the U-boots and their "milk cows" so often that the obvious possibilities were: 1. the allies had enormous numbers of sub killers 2. the allies were incredibly lucky 3. Enigma was broken Waiting for proof before acting is not a sensible decision. (Even in WW1, the aviators regularly changed their codes used. They knew they were only good for a few days each.)
    - Retric 10y ago
      4. The US had some other means of tracking subs.
      - WalterBright 10y ago
        Not long range methods other than breaking Enigma messages which said where/when U-boots were to go. This is what made breaking Enigma so important.
        Retric 10y ago
        That's what we actually did, however RADAR was a new thing allowing a small number of British aircraft to regularly intercept Bombers. Without any evidence it must have seemed probable for something similar to be locating subs.
        lostlogin 10y ago
        Regularly intercept in daylight - it performed poorly roughy that at night interception rates were abysmal.
        Retric 10y ago
        Detection worked just fine at night. The problem was: "Although the RAF control stations were aware of the location of the bombers, there was little they could do about them unless fighter pilots made visual contact." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_in_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_in_World_War_II
    - adekok 10y ago
      The British did significant amounts of data analysis and traffic analysis. e.g. estimating German tank production by looking at the serial numbers of captured / destroyed German tanks. I don't recall anything about the Germans doing the same thing.
  - mturmon 10y ago
    Another factor (according to the excellent Battle of Wits by Budiansky) was that the Germans were overconfident that Enigma was unbreakable. Turned out their confidence in the hard computation that would need to be done to decode Enigma was wrong.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
  Bit unfair, dumping on people who had seventy or eighty years less experience, and profit from widely published literature and history on the topic. I mean, it's not like they could even go read the Wikipedia piece on the German tank serial numbers info leak. Might have been a feature of a certain seminal strategy game - "you have defeated A[213 of 330]" ;-)
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    They did have extensive experience with spying in general, and compartmentalization of it. The compartmentalization was not applied to encryption. They also knew that losing an enigma machine to the enemy could compromise it (and did), but they just apparently assumed that no U-boot lost its enigma machine to the enemy.
- Lagged2Death 10y ago
  I am still surprised that the Japanese and Germans did not figure out their codes had been broken. There must have been a lot of people who had suspicions. But consider: for many years, US citizens who talked about ECHELON were considered crazies. Later, Bush's enormous surveillance expansion was mostly denied or dismissed. The 2016 Russian hacks of the DNC and the propaganda machine were brought up on national television during the debates. Yet there was denial, dismissal, and very little concern. Without a plan for responding or reacting, denial is a very appealing way to deal with upsetting news. The Germans and the Japanese who were in a position to suspect that their communications had been compromised were also embedded in a totalitarian military chain of command, more focused on preserving the relative power of the people at the top than anything else. Questioning the efficacy of the system is easily cast as disloyalty. What could anyone do?
- usrusr 10y ago
  By the time statistical evidence could have grown strong enough to shine through the careful layers of deception, they were far to busy not noticing that they were losing the war to notice that they lost the encryption battle. In a world of believers, only traitors quantify bad news.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    Oh, they noticed all right. From "U-Boat Ace" by Jordan Vause pg. 103: "retrieved a working Enigma machine along with the documents and code keys for three months. Not surprisingly, U-Bootwaffe fortunes declined in the following months, and from that point on Doenitz remained in doubt about the Enigma cyphers his boats were using. But the experts reassured him over and over again that they were sound, and so he retained them until the end of the war."
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      I haven't found anything on the subject, but he would have been alive when Enigma become public. It would be great to know his thoughts (and those of people like Speer).
- rythie 10y ago
  This was not a trivial system for it's time. Do you change your ssh keys and certificates every day? The enigma had a new encryption code for everyday distributed on paper and torn off and destroyed once used. The were different codes and machines used in different branches of the army/navy and the system was updated through the war. The British didn't get to see the machines or it's method for many years. There were 159 quintillion possible keys and even a 1 million guesses/second it would take 5 million years to guess a code - and don't forget they changed everyday. Also, remember there were no computers to do this, let alone one that that could even remotely approach 1 million operations a second. So you ought to able to see at the time people were pretty confident it couldn't be broken, and if they hadn't made some mistake in it's use e.g. distributing weather reports, it might have not been. We are arguably much more complacent than they were vs. their time. It was only recently that perfect forward security became a thing in HTTPS for example (i.e. different key for each connection).
mirimir 10y ago
Well, from what I've read, that's why they didn't share information about the 9-11 team. And during WWII, they let some convoys go down to protect their methods. It's a tough call. One thread of Stephenson's Cryptonomicon covers this.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Perfect timing, I'm currently at page 2.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    :) So I've read everything of his at least three times. And I'm waiting. Anyone know if something's immanent?
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      I can't answer that at all, I'm just saying that if I ever get to the end of that 1100+ paper brick.. I sohuld probably travel to his town to express how good a storyteller he is.
      - ihaveajob 10y ago
        So worth the time investment. I read it in college and it was mind blowing. Now... I have a kid to feed! But I yearn for books like that one.
        waterphone 10y ago
        If you haven't yet, read The Baroque Cycle too. It's set in the same universe, approximately 300 years earlier, with an ensemble cast of historical and fictional characters. Very long, very dense at times, and yet a masterful and very rewarding work in my opinion. The audiobooks read by Simon Prebble are also quite good if you don't have the time to read it in print but do have time where you could listen to it.
Ar-Curunir 10y ago
ENIGMA is easy compared to modern crypto; it did not have a sound mathematical analysis. Hell there was no such thing as proper cryptanalysis back then. Academia is much more advanced now; all the tools we have for reasoning about our cryptography were developed in academia, with no evidence that the NSA has shown any interest in that kind of stuff. (In fact the NSA has expressed disdain for academic cryptography).
- ooqr 10y ago
  Don't they hire loads of mathematicians? What else would that be for?
  - gech 10y ago
    How much do they pay
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- sah2ed 10y ago
  "There are hundreds of mathematicians in the NSA, far more than in academic settings, so readership for a typical paper is wider than in the world at large ..." [1] [1] http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/35091267 http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/35...
  - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    That is 15 years old; cryptography as a field has seen tremendous growth in that time frame.

WalterBright 10y ago

I am still surprised that the Japanese and Germans did not figure out their codes had been broken. The disaster of the U-boot campaign was pretty good evidence of that, if nothing else. Besides, expecting a widely used and deployed cryptosystem to be uncompromised for years is absurd. They should have assumed it would be broken, and developed regular replacements.

antman 10y ago
They organized airplane flyovers that "saw" the U-boats. The Germans did not know how many aircrafts were patrolling and whether it was a high or low probability of being spotted. If the British could not organize a parallel construction they simply let it go. They knew the plan for Crete invasion but they could not create a story on how they learned it so they preferred to lose naval control of the large part of the eastern Mediterranean sea. [0] [0] https://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Secret-Service-David-Stafford/dp/1909609137 https://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Secret-Service-David-Staffo...
- WalterBright 10y ago
  The sub killers were waiting at meeting points for the U-boots and their "milk cows" so often that the obvious possibilities were: 1. the allies had enormous numbers of sub killers 2. the allies were incredibly lucky 3. Enigma was broken Waiting for proof before acting is not a sensible decision. (Even in WW1, the aviators regularly changed their codes used. They knew they were only good for a few days each.)
  - Retric 10y ago
    4. The US had some other means of tracking subs.
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      Not long range methods other than breaking Enigma messages which said where/when U-boots were to go. This is what made breaking Enigma so important.
      - Retric 10y ago
        That's what we actually did, however RADAR was a new thing allowing a small number of British aircraft to regularly intercept Bombers. Without any evidence it must have seemed probable for something similar to be locating subs.
        lostlogin 10y ago
        Regularly intercept in daylight - it performed poorly roughy that at night interception rates were abysmal.
        Retric 10y ago
        Detection worked just fine at night. The problem was: "Although the RAF control stations were aware of the location of the bombers, there was little they could do about them unless fighter pilots made visual contact." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_in_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_in_World_War_II
  - adekok 10y ago
    The British did significant amounts of data analysis and traffic analysis. e.g. estimating German tank production by looking at the serial numbers of captured / destroyed German tanks. I don't recall anything about the Germans doing the same thing.
- mturmon 10y ago
  Another factor (according to the excellent Battle of Wits by Budiansky) was that the Germans were overconfident that Enigma was unbreakable. Turned out their confidence in the hard computation that would need to be done to decode Enigma was wrong.
B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
Bit unfair, dumping on people who had seventy or eighty years less experience, and profit from widely published literature and history on the topic. I mean, it's not like they could even go read the Wikipedia piece on the German tank serial numbers info leak. Might have been a feature of a certain seminal strategy game - "you have defeated A[213 of 330]" ;-)
- WalterBright 10y ago
  They did have extensive experience with spying in general, and compartmentalization of it. The compartmentalization was not applied to encryption. They also knew that losing an enigma machine to the enemy could compromise it (and did), but they just apparently assumed that no U-boot lost its enigma machine to the enemy.
Lagged2Death 10y ago
I am still surprised that the Japanese and Germans did not figure out their codes had been broken. There must have been a lot of people who had suspicions. But consider: for many years, US citizens who talked about ECHELON were considered crazies. Later, Bush's enormous surveillance expansion was mostly denied or dismissed. The 2016 Russian hacks of the DNC and the propaganda machine were brought up on national television during the debates. Yet there was denial, dismissal, and very little concern. Without a plan for responding or reacting, denial is a very appealing way to deal with upsetting news. The Germans and the Japanese who were in a position to suspect that their communications had been compromised were also embedded in a totalitarian military chain of command, more focused on preserving the relative power of the people at the top than anything else. Questioning the efficacy of the system is easily cast as disloyalty. What could anyone do?
usrusr 10y ago
By the time statistical evidence could have grown strong enough to shine through the careful layers of deception, they were far to busy not noticing that they were losing the war to notice that they lost the encryption battle. In a world of believers, only traitors quantify bad news.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  Oh, they noticed all right. From "U-Boat Ace" by Jordan Vause pg. 103: "retrieved a working Enigma machine along with the documents and code keys for three months. Not surprisingly, U-Bootwaffe fortunes declined in the following months, and from that point on Doenitz remained in doubt about the Enigma cyphers his boats were using. But the experts reassured him over and over again that they were sound, and so he retained them until the end of the war."
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    I haven't found anything on the subject, but he would have been alive when Enigma become public. It would be great to know his thoughts (and those of people like Speer).
rythie 10y ago
This was not a trivial system for it's time. Do you change your ssh keys and certificates every day? The enigma had a new encryption code for everyday distributed on paper and torn off and destroyed once used. The were different codes and machines used in different branches of the army/navy and the system was updated through the war. The British didn't get to see the machines or it's method for many years. There were 159 quintillion possible keys and even a 1 million guesses/second it would take 5 million years to guess a code - and don't forget they changed everyday. Also, remember there were no computers to do this, let alone one that that could even remotely approach 1 million operations a second. So you ought to able to see at the time people were pretty confident it couldn't be broken, and if they hadn't made some mistake in it's use e.g. distributing weather reports, it might have not been. We are arguably much more complacent than they were vs. their time. It was only recently that perfect forward security became a thing in HTTPS for example (i.e. different key for each connection).

mirimir 10y ago

Well, from what I've read, that's why they didn't share information about the 9-11 team. And during WWII, they let some convoys go down to protect their methods. It's a tough call. One thread of Stephenson's Cryptonomicon covers this.

agumonkey 10y ago
Perfect timing, I'm currently at page 2.
- mirimir 10y ago
  :) So I've read everything of his at least three times. And I'm waiting. Anyone know if something's immanent?
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    I can't answer that at all, I'm just saying that if I ever get to the end of that 1100+ paper brick.. I sohuld probably travel to his town to express how good a storyteller he is.
    - ihaveajob 10y ago
      So worth the time investment. I read it in college and it was mind blowing. Now... I have a kid to feed! But I yearn for books like that one.
      - waterphone 10y ago
        If you haven't yet, read The Baroque Cycle too. It's set in the same universe, approximately 300 years earlier, with an ensemble cast of historical and fictional characters. Very long, very dense at times, and yet a masterful and very rewarding work in my opinion. The audiobooks read by Simon Prebble are also quite good if you don't have the time to read it in print but do have time where you could listen to it.

Ar-Curunir 10y ago

ENIGMA is easy compared to modern crypto; it did not have a sound mathematical analysis. Hell there was no such thing as proper cryptanalysis back then. Academia is much more advanced now; all the tools we have for reasoning about our cryptography were developed in academia, with no evidence that the NSA has shown any interest in that kind of stuff. (In fact the NSA has expressed disdain for academic cryptography).

ooqr 10y ago
Don't they hire loads of mathematicians? What else would that be for?
- gech 10y ago
  How much do they pay
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
sah2ed 10y ago
"There are hundreds of mathematicians in the NSA, far more than in academic settings, so readership for a typical paper is wider than in the world at large ..." [1] [1] http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/35091267 http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/35...
- Ar-Curunir 10y ago
  That is 15 years old; cryptography as a field has seen tremendous growth in that time frame.