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IIRC there was one German operator who used his sweetheart's initials over and over as the combination allowing for decryption.
by bragr 3y ago
IIRC there was one German operator who used his sweetheart's initials over and over as the combination allowing for decryption.
- jonathankoren 3y agoI believe these single letter "messages" were useful in quickly determining the day's setup, and maybe wiring diagrams, but I'm not sure about the last part.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoI wonder if they had the passwords as post-its next to the machine…
- littlestymaar 3y agoPost-it only got invented in 1968 unfortunately.
- boffinAudio 3y agoBack then, post-its were called slates.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoWasn't it all messages ending with "heil hitler"? I mean that could be the operator's sweetheart in a way.
- bragr 3y agoSort of, but that's a massive oversimplification. The bomba machines needed shorts "cribs" of expected plain text to search against, like "heil hitler" as you mentioned, and I think usually they went after the standard start of the day weather report. But the bomba only can reduce the search space, it doesn't produce the answer, and analysts still need to manually break it. So yes but it was hard so they also took advantage of operator error where ever possible. This stack exchange explain it well: https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/30332/why-does-the-term-cilly-begin-at-the-start-of-every-message-in-the-imitation https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/30332/why-does-th...