3 ms·
Impossible to say. The German commo who was tasked with decrypting this message couldn't/didn't decrypt it, and he had the keys. For all we know, some bored Ge
by nwallin 3y ago
Impossible to say. The German commo who was tasked with decrypting this message couldn't/didn't decrypt it, and he had the keys.
For all we know, some bored German submariner sent garbage over the radio as protest; this message was sent two days after Hitler committed suicide, 7 days before VE day. (8 days if you're of the Soviet persuasion) Morale and discipline has a tendency to break down under those circumstances.
Or it could be a transcription error. Modern cryptanalysis tends to be more resilient to transcription errors; one character wrong is gonna be ok, one character inserted/deleted will tend to produce two messages, one with garbage after the insertion/deletion and another with garbage before it. But Enigma messages were...terse, so a half-successful decrypt that gets half garbage and half plaintext might still be recognized by the cryptanalysis algorithm as the wrong key. I expect there would have to be at least two transcription errors to cause both the original German commo to be unable to decrypt it and modern attempts to fail.
- hinkley 3y agoGarbled message, or garbled key? I wonder how often mis-keyed messages were sent out. Not typos in the message, but setting the initial state to the wrong value. Transposition, for instance.
- nwallin 3y agoGarbled message. If it were a garbled key, that would explain why the original commo couldn't/didn't decrypt it, but if it were just a garbled key, modern cryptanalysis would have decrypted it already.