You've missed an important part of the story. Flowers a working class self taught genius who left school at 16 was asked to build a mechanical decoding machine by these Cambridge professors He said he could do it but had a better idea. Instead of using mechanical switches he would use valves (vacuum tubes). He was so sure he used his own money to create Colossus. His machine was so fast in it calculations it was only limited by the speed of the data (a reel of punched paper) fed into it.
============================== I see Flowers as being a British Patriot, ============================== who gave his all. We need some today, as our country is invaded. /
My understanding is that valves were in very short supply. If there had been many more available, he could have designed a machine whch used valves to store the content of the paper tape and if he had, the speed of Colosus would be been defined by the time to clock in each stored frame to the processor the time to perform computations per frame. I suspect that the combination of these would have been have faster than the clock signal defined by the velocity of the paper tape (even though it was exceptionally fast).
As a footnote, Flowers was in German occupied territory when war was declared, and had he been detained as a British National on the border, the Colossus would not have existed. After the war, when Flowers wanted to build electronic exchanges, he was not allowed to refer to his war time experience. He was never compensated for the building of the Colossus.
Tommy Flowers was turned down by the military when he offered to build Colossus because they thought it impracticable due to all the valves. He build it anyway using his own money and the rest is history, thank goodness for men like Flowers.
Soviet radio "traffic" could be anything. Low level logistics or Admin traffic vs. high level headquarters traffic. Also the Soviets could have easily manufactured false traffic to keep the Germans fooled. Overall, the Germans signals intelligence did very little to help them fight the Soviets. The Soviets were also masters of deception, and had excellent sources within the German ranks telling the Soviets about German intell. Don't forget about all those German signal soldiers captured by the Soviets. The Soviets would not hesitate to torture them to talk.
The Soviets had captured Lorenz machines in the final days of the war in Europe. They put them to use, never considering that the Allies had access to the same technology, and were reading their mail. That's why the Lorenz information remained classified for such a long time.
@@user-nu1vn3yy9s There is little evidence for your claim. The Soviets used Lorenz for some time after WWII, which indicates either that they believed either: i) That nobody else had captured a physical machine, and Russian cryptographers could not imagine it being recreated virtually. ii) That the system was so robust that even if opposition cryptanalysts had access to a machine, no individual transmission could be decrypted. iii) The western Allies had no knowledge of Lorenz, and could not crack it. If they had believed otherwise, they would not have used Lorenz. They did use it, and NATO read their mail. As for the use of one time pads: mid to high level bulk communications traffic is not encoded on one time pads. Military and diplomatic traffic is huge. Messages on one time pads are very short, of necessity. They also rely on being composed of truly random number sequences. Generating sufficient sequences would have been an impossible task at Mid C20th. Having a ready built and apparently unbreachable system to use everyday must have seemed like a Godsend. It was more useful to know the general picture of what the Soviets were doing, than their top secrets.
The suggestion that the Soviets used captured Lorenz machines doesn't make sense as John Cairncross had been passing raw decrypts to his NKVD handler from 1943 onwards.
The Germans are pretty intellectual and appreciated that any code could be broken given enough time and resources. With war messages time is of the essence, and if the enemy read the messages in clear text 2 or 3 weeks later, so what?
@@BasementEngineerthe germans were also nazis and killed lots of pilots by trying to make a plane bigger than the Lancaster dive(shallow) so don't Apply to much logic to them
@@gingernutpreacher Yes indeed. The Germans were sooo stupid that it took the ENTIRE capitalist and communist world almost 6 years to defeat that small European country.
Enigma was a code system for tactical use. There were 60000+ Enigma machines in the field. Lorentz was a system for use at high levels. It was used on just 11 radio links among the high command.
@@user-nu1vn3yy9s The security of a cipher system does not depend on keeping the machine secret; it is assumed that the enemy has one. The security comes from the key.
@@user-nu1vn3yy9s Kerckhoff's principle dates to 1883; it is not a new idea. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle Of course, you don't hand your enemy your hardware, but your system must be designed so that if---when, really---they do get hold of one, it is still secure. The real reason to keep your machines secret is so that the enemy can't steal your technology and make their ciphers as good as yours. That's why the Americans would not let the British even see the outside of the SIGABA machine. And yes, that is practice as well as theory. Security by obscurity is a recipe for disaster.
@@user-nu1vn3yy9s _"" I won't bother repeating it." - it's so easy to decipher this attitude in your style of answering."_ Since you seem to be able to read the previous posts in this thread, I will repeat what I said before: "Kerckhoff's principle dates to 1883; it is not a new idea. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle Of course, you don't hand your enemy your hardware, but your system must be designed so that if---when, really---they do get hold of one, it is still secure. The real reason to keep your machines secret is so that the enemy can't steal your technology and make their ciphers as good as yours. That's why the Americans would not let the British even see the outside of the SIGABA machine. And yes, that is practice as well as theory. Security by obscurity is a recipe for disaster." Are you happy now? _"You have little knowledge about real operations' history, so you repeat 1st year in college level of security principles."_ I have never taken a college course in security. I learned on the job. _"By the way, so many companies don't want to publish the code of the soft they developed."_ Are you serious? You are equating---or is it confusing?---computer code and cryptology? Seriously? And you accuse me of knowing nothing about crypto.
@@user-nu1vn3yy9s _"Because in the same line of thinking the soft must be open-source, so ppl will correct the errors and point out vulnerabilities."_ What!!?? Are you seriously suggesting that governments ask their enemies to evaluate their crypto? _"ZERO information."_ Exactly. Your posts contain precisely zero information. You are just stringing random words together in the hope that no one will notice that you have no idea what you are talking about. I'm done wasting time on your trolling.
The more obscure the language, the better. Makes me wonder whether fictional languages like LotR's Elvish and Star Wars' Mando'a could be pretty useful in war...
The Enigma was broken in 1932 by three Polish mathematicians: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, who were employed by the Polish military Cipher Bureau. The first Polish copy of the military version of "Enigma" was built in the "Ava" factory in Warsaw in 1933. The process of putting the elements together took place in Pyry near Warsaw. From then on, Poles could read German military correspondence. In 1939, Poland handed over the Enigma documentation to the British.
after nazi/ ussr pact aug 23, "39 The Poles told the Brits {Everybody new} upcoming german invasion, and they had broken the code,,, Had they used the info ... ??? Who knows ???
Though the Poles were entirely dependent on information from a German traitor to read Enigma, and once this source was cut off, and more rotors added, the Poles were baffled, and only the British had the intellectual firepower to continue reading the messages.
@@dupplinmuir113 You are funny :))))))))))))))) and you talk nonsense that is inconsistent with documents and historical truth. Oh my god, where do people like this come from ? :))))))))))))))
That's why the British needed over 6,000 personnel to read that "simple" code, right? It took time and resources to break the code, and with military messages, time was of the essence.
@@BasementEngineer They also put decoding on effectively a production line process; decoding and distributing thousands of messages per day. Gordon Welchman's 'The Hut Six Story' gives a of detail.
Specific topic but I would love to see a vid on the 1st and 2nd battles of El Alamein. My great grandfather was in the Desert Rats and fought in both as well as Tobruk. I've watched Geestly's pretty much from the start and these 2 new channels will make a fine addition to my collection. Keep up the great work!
I’d never heard of this Code. The problem with Enigma was it was not developed by Germany. It was created by civilians and then offered on the open market to anybody. So, Bletchley Park had a huge advantage when war broke out. Poland had made significant strides in exploiting Enigma’s vulnerabilities and was instrumental in starting BP on the road to breaking the code.
Dude. I'm honestly mind blown, this video was fantastic. I never knew the story of the Lorenz Cipher, TICOM, Colossus, and what the allies found during the collapse of Nazi Germany.
@@CBielski87 I was expecting this. Lorenz had nothing to do with Enigma. For starters the Enigma used only capital letters and numbers, Lorenz used the teleprinter font similar to a modern keyboard, utilising upper and lower case, numbers and special characters. The Polish code breakers also got their hands on an Enigma machine in the '30's. Bill Tutt didn't see a Lorenz machine until after the war.
You could still buy the civilian version of the Enigma machine until the stock market crash of 1929, it'd been in use since 1926 invented by a Dutch inventor, as a machine to encode secret business information and was adopted in 1926 by the Weimar German army as their personal code.
I didnt know that. It was a commercially available machine? Guess I never really thought of where it came from, but i would never have guess it was like buying a very smart typewriter in an appliance store! Thanx for this info. :-)
Just reacently it went public that in Switzerland a company founded secretly by the USA sold engine like encryption machines to countries like Iran etc. The the selling point was the swiss neutrality. But those machines could decrypted by the US.
@@johnryder1713 Scherbius applied for a patent (filed 23 February 1918) for a cipher machine based on rotating wired wheels that is now known as a rotor machine. Over a year and a half later, Koch filed for his rotor machine patent on 7 October 1919.
The real secret of the code talkers is that it relies on racism. First, the colonial racism of the oppressors (US and Canada). The belief that aboriginal languages are somehow lesser, in extreme cases this attitude extends to other colonial languages (French, Spanish, etc.). Second, it requires the colonial racism of the opponent. The opponent already believes that your language is beneath them, and strangely that adopts your attitudes to other languages. Racists tend to take racist beliefs on uncritically, except for those associated with them of course. It becomes quite clear when you examine what was done in Canada with the same sort of idea. Our version of code talkers was a little more informal, and didn't involve people of a particular nation. For example, in our case the Cree was the most common language used for code talking, which happens to the largest linguistic group in Canada. But both countries have much to answer for, since at the same time each country was operating residential schools where child abuse was rampant and speaking your own language was punished.
Well ... Navaho didn't have a written literature *at the time,* or a published grammar or dictionary. That was one of the important things about it, because Germany remembered the success of Choctaw code talkers in WWI, and sent spies to America as anthropologists to gather up records of Native languages. Diné Bizaad (which is the language's own name for itself) had not been documented yet. It has a perfectly good writing system nowadays. Other things that made it a success: A relatively large speaker population, so that as many as 400 Navaho Marines could train as code talkers. A phonetic system with lotttttts of consonants that you can't easily tell apart if you grew up speaking German, or Italian, or Japanese (or English, or French, or Russian, or Chinese). And training with a codebook, so that even when the Japanese did capture and torture an untrained Navaho, he couldn't tell them anything. (If the message was "when can the grenade detail commit" the literal translation would be "weasel hen can bluejay potato deer tail come glove.") You can check out the codebook here: www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/n/navajo-code-talker-dictionary.html
@@eritain There are sounds in the language that have no alphabetic equivalent such as glottal stops, grunts and clicks (sorry that's the best I can do because there is no equivalent). It is like trying to write down exactly what a sneeze or a cough sounds like. You can come close but sometimes slight differences in sound/timing change the meaning.
Cipher messages are always broken when the operators fail to use established protocols. The real importance people should take away from this video is that MATH is an important skill and not a racist western construct!
Regardless of how much intelligence you have on your opponent, if you don't possess the forces to react, then its only so much useless data. Future events will make your intelligence reports irrelevant. General Gehlen (army chief intelligence officer on the Eastern Front) wrote how frustrating this was. He was later employed by NATO. Some considered him as having the most knowledge on how the Soviet army operated and planned during the cold war. He makes some very interesting reading.
Colossus. A dimly remembered sci-fi movie about a computer that wants to rule the world and eventually becomes a human. But imagine the original. Taking up an entire room with maybe a few thousand vacuum tubes ( yes i know, thermionic valves) and operated by switches and plugs. And hotter then hell to be around.
It was called Colossus:The Forbin Project. (1970) Excellent first Sci-Fi about computers gaining sentience and omnipotent power. It's around on disc and streaming but make sure you get the print that runs 1:40, there was a hacked down TV print to run 90 minutes including commercials. Saw it when it came out and still love it.
If you want to see what colossus looked like there is a working full size replica at The National Museum of Computing Bletchley Park England, working every day the museum is open. Plus the Bombe used for getting the enigma wheel start settings. H Block was the worlds first computer room housing the Colossus machines. See the web site www.tnmoc.org/ Better still come visit if you can or take a virtual tour.
One of the reasons that I looked in on this particular story is that I use stories like these the re-establish broken memory links. A stroke left me with minimal physical damage, but my Memory Cathedral looks rather like Notre Dame d'Paris. This story was one of those that especial invokes memories for me: a misspent youth, a love for puzzles and math. All that and add in a penchant for artificial intelligence, and a fan of Alan Turing, boy genius. My reaction to this video was best described as warm familiarity. I would describe my level of knowledge of cryptography as high amateur, but not that required of a cryptographer. Over and over, the reaction as you told the story your way, I found myself thinking "Ok, x needs to be talked about" and you talked about "x." Divergences from my personal expectations were of the "difference of opinion" sort. The Lorenz cipher machine is the exception. While much of what you said is largely accurate, a little specialist knowledge is applicable. In 1970s the pop culture book contained enough information about Lorenz to cause interest, and in the Comp Sci community there was the vague description of the box that cracked it. When the security deadline passed, the code breaking community (amateur and professional) had more of a "whose conjecture was accurate" attitude.
There was no keyboard attached to the Lorenz machine. Messages would be typed-up on a standard teleprinter (aka teletype) and punched onto paper tape. This tape was then fed through a tape-reader connected to the Lorenz machine. The cypher machine then combined each character from the tape with a "key" character created by the internal wheels to create a new character which was different from either of those two. The enciphered message was then transmitted by landline or radio to the receiving station. At the receiving station the enciphered message was punched into paper tape which was then fed through another Lorenz machine. As long as both Lorenz machines had identical wheel settings the output of the second machine was the plain-text which could then be printed out on a teleprinter. Once the Bletchley Park codebreakers had worked out the internal arrangement of the Lorenz machine (which was an amazing achievement) "all" that was needed to decypher messages was to work out the original wheel settings. This is what Colossus was built to do, by being able to test a range of possible settings at very high speed and then using statistical analysis of the result to determine the probability of each being the correct one. Once the wheel settings had been discovered the message was actually decyphered and printed-out using a different machine known as a "British Tunny".
And Arne Beurling cracked the Siemens & Halske T52 in two weeks on pen and paper, twice. That's why he got Albert Einsteins office at Princeton after Einsteins passing. Did Turing get that?
Tutte became a Felow of the Royal Society and was famous (In UK) Tommy Flowers was an engineer from the GPO (General Post Office) but was never fully recognised because of his strong Cockney accent which he never lost.
The team led by Tommy Flowers who built the Colossus were at the Post Office Research Station which was in Brook Road, Dollis Hill, London. My late father worked on the optical reader for the punched paper tapes. Nobody who worked on the Colossus said a word about it until some information was accidentally released in the USA in the 1970s, and nobody said much until the 2000s. The big secret was that UK intelligence could crack the Lorenz code; many countries' diplomatic and intelligence services were still using similar equipment many years later in the belief that it was totally secure. The research station was moved to Martlesham in Suffolk in the 1970s and the Dollis Hill buildings were demolished and built over. On the new estate one of the roads is called Flowers Close.
Well researched and very well presented. I have read hundreds and hundreds of books on military history and watched hundreds of documentaries but you always learn something new. Thank you. Looking forward to more of your excellent documentaries.
The most important part of the Lorenz Cipher was the fact that it connected to teletypes. You can type up an extremely long message, several pages in length, walk over to your Lorenz Cipher machine, set up the rotors, make radio contact with the receiving station then feed in the punched paper tape and it would encrypt and send the whole thing in less than a minute. In the last full month of the war in Europe, over 8 MB of data was sent encrypted using the Lorenz cipher. Bletchley Park was able to read all of it. The Enigma was Ultra portable but it was slow. The Lorenz machine was less portable but capable of handling much higher volume.
Arne Beurling to FRA: Someone said Geheimschreiber? Please hold my snappsglas, and give me a pen and paper. Oh, you switched to Lorenz because we read all your messages. That's cute.
They most likely captured it & presumably Russian-supporting Germans (yes, there were some) in the signalling service showed them how to use it. Being able to listen in on Nazi high command signals would be a great advantage in the dying days of the war. In the post-war period, I assume that the Russians used Lorenz thinking that it was unbroken & unbreakable, little realising that the British & Americans were reading it like a book. Russian ambitions in Europe were identified as a grave threat to Western powers well before the end of WW2.
Karl Dönitz had four-rotor (M4) Enigma machines (Triton) put onboard U-Boats and other Kriegsmarine vessels from late 1941 - Station X called this new cypher SHARK - allied code breakers were unable to read U-Boat communications during early to mid 1942 unless the M4 Enigma had to encode "backwards compatible" to a 3 three rotor enigma machine
Another weakness that allowed Lorenz to be cracked was a Japanese diplomat sending some of the messages encrypted with Lorenz back to Japan in a much weaker encryption. Lorenz does not change the length of a message, so with a bit of clever guessing, the two versions could be found together. So the British also had a few messages in an unencrypted and an encrypted version to work with.
The swedish matematician Arne (Karl-August) Beurling cracked this by hand during the war , he stands statue at the swedish counter intelligence centre at FRA
Tommy Flowers was the unsung hero of this process, I believe he even funded this enormity (or maybe partially funded it - memory plays games with me sometimes) himself. A truly brilliant engineer all but forgotten in the Alan Turing publicity roundabout. Tutte seems to have been similarly brushed out of the picture. Wonder why???
Because of the Official Secrets act. Not all the Colossus where broken up, two went off to what is now GCHQ and a third is rumoured to have gone to Manchester University to be the start of the Manchester Baby en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby Tommy Flowers went off back to Dollis Hill to the Post Office Research Station. Tommy was at the switch on of the Rebuild with Tony Sale and HRH Duke of Kent www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/rebuild.htm
@@johndunn4162 Thanks for this John. I hope he found some satisfaction in belated and inadequate show of appreciation. Should have been Sir Thomas Flowers at the very least - seems that's kept for more important folk such as footballers and singers eh!?
I visited Bletchley Park in 2003 to mark a Polish gathering there (I'm not Polish but I had Brit-Polish mates) complete with open-air Catholic mass. Polish were cracking the code initially before the Nazis added a fourth wheel to the machine.
my dad was in the signals and joined the GPO after the war, he used to mention Tommy Flowers a lot i think he was well kown in telecom circles but maybe not by the the general public
Making the code harder was clanging the original A equal 1 .Do this then switching numbers g egual 18 and giving other letters from g to m a random set of numbers .The adding wheels on enigma spins a new set of codes each time .
I'd love to see a piece done on Green Hornet / SIGSALY including how they synchronised the record players between England and the U.S that had the white noise crib on which encoded and decoded the telephone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt.
The German had their equivalent and were breaking various operational codes used by the allies. However the codes where Egnima information was transmitted was more complex and never broken.
We had our own Enigma-like machines that the Germans sporadically worked on breaking, but never could. They thought it was impossible, and that was partly the reason they were confident that Enigma was safe. From what I've read, our machines were actually better and didn't have some of the Enigma's flaws. I don't know if our procedures were better or more rigorously adhered to.
@@kentix417 The Germans knew that given enough time and resources any code could be broken. Why do you think they had different levels of encryption such as 3, rotor, 4 rotor, and Lorenz machines. To decrypt this stuff took TIME, and for military information time is of the essence. 2 or 3 weeks from transmission the message may well be worthless. That's why the Germans did not spend too much time decrypting messages.
I have spent a lot of time watching and reading about Bletchley Park, Turing, Enigma, and, crucially, "the Tiltman Break," the astounding mathematical achievements of Bill Tutte first working out the machine architecture from the key string obtained from the break, and subsequently (with a possible hint from Alan Turing, of course!) the detection of double letters and spaces, which is what Colossus did, and of course the groundbreaking engineering of Tommy Flowers. All that said, this was by far the best 6 or 7-minute summary of the whole thing I've ever seen. The icing for me was the TICOM discussion. I had never heard that before! And, to answer your question, no -- Tutte was only able to work out the rotors by analyzing the bits from the key string obtained from the break, plus the luck that it was a relatively long message (some 4,000 characters). HQIBPEXEZMUG!
Didn’t Swedish Arne Beurling crack the T52 similar to the Lorentz in 1940 he did it in two weeks with pen and paper a feat later replicated by Bill Tutte ?? And Swedish telephone company Eriksson built a T52 analogue machines[3] that could decode the messages once the key settings had been found by hand? They knew about operation Barbarossa before it even happened and tried to worn russia without saying they had cracked the Germans code but Russia would not listen. Right me if I’m wrong😅 beside that great video 👏ps fun fact Arne beurling went to From 1954 he was professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, where he took over Albert Einstein's office.
The hardest codes probably went to the Native American codes created during the war. Probably because the Axis powers had little knowledge of Native languages. (I'm making a guess before I watch the video)
I agree. Is it/was it even a written language? Only a few thousand people in the world spoke it, and they all lived in N. America and they created words specifically for the war like for "tanks", "artillery", etc..words that have no meaning in Navajo. In addition, except for maybe some other Native American languages, it doesn't belong to any "family of languages". Unlike English which is a Germanic language in the Indo-European family. It had to sound like gibberish to the Japanese radio operators.
Arguably though, that's not a code, but a different language. If you don't know German and you hear someone speaking German, they're not exactly trying to hide something, you just can't understand them. That's probably why he didn't pull them up for the "hardest codes to crack". Because it ain't a code. Now, encrypting an obscure language, now THAT'S gonna be a pretty tough one to crack.
@@daddysempaichan Navajo Code Talkers, who CREATED A CODE based on the complex, unwritten Navajo language. The code primarily used word association by assigning a Navajo word to key phrases and military tactics.
I highly recommend computerphiles videos on the Lorenz, it shows how the machine was broken in high detail. The basic idea is that the Lorenz wheels generate a 5-bit stream that the characters input are xor-ed with. This means that in theory for each character you have to be guess the message key for the number of combinations increases by 32... but if you have two different messages with the same key, where they are different you get the two inputs xor-ed... and you can use that to gradually get the messages out (whenever you make a guess for one input, if you're right you should get German out for the other input)
Wow, where did you dig this up at?! I have never heard of any other encoding system used by Germany other than Enigma. I always believed it was the ultimate system. Lorenz is I name I'll have to remember.
Pretty well known actually, nice video explaining the cracking of Lorenz but nearly each history book about that era will mention the Lorenz as much if not even more than the Enigma machine.
Enigma story is just more interesting because of what ended up happening to Turing. And the idea of the turning test. So it lived on. Plus...the cold war info didnt get released till post 2000
They also used the one time pad. A long dead pigeon was found in a chimney in Britain recently carrying a one-time pad encrypted message. Even with today's technology, it could not be decrypted.
You might do a video on the one-time-pad encoding that the Allies used to distribute Enigma intercepts. As long as all the procedures are followed, those cannot be broken.
When I was in high school electronics class, we learned about colossus, but Not this. Years later in computer tech school, we went over colossus again. We had trouble learning anything about why/for what about it. Now I know why......
Enigma was used for field tactical operations, logistics and administrative communications traffic while Lorenz was used for strategic operations. Logistics and administrative communications traffic for high command and control……and, enigma had been designed to be portable while Lorenz was designed to be installed due to its enhanced complexity and size.
Yes, Lorenz was never going to be a replacement for Enigma. It was not portable. You couldn't throw it in your truck and hit the road for field operations.
That last part made me think about the deciphering by Germans on the Allies transmissions as well as Japan. Well, basically everyone else. What we normaly don't hear. It's mainly Enigma, Enigma, Enigma, possibly Lorenz, that's it.
The British used a similar teletype machine to Enigma called Typex. The Germans knew about Typex and captured one either in Norway or Dunkirk. But because they thought Enigma was uncrackable they never tried to break it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typex#:~:text=In%20the%20history%20of%20cryptography,that%20greatly%20increased%20its%20security.
i think it originally had two, then a third added. Admiral karl doenitz was getting suspicious near the end of the war and ordered a fourth wheel installed.
@@michaelsommers2356 The navy had eight rotors, but the machines only operated with three until February 1942 when the submarine service rolled out an enigma machine with four rotors. That resulted in nearly a year of no submarine decodes until the US 4 unit bombe designed by Joe Desch and made by NCR helped break the traffic.
@@JimWatt Clearly what I meant was that the naval Enigma used four rotors at a time, while the army and air force used three. It should be noted that the extra rotor was not interchangeable with the original rotors, and did not in fact rotate during use. Also, the blackout ended when the new rotors were stolen, not when the four-rotor bombes became available, starting in May '43.
I had SEEN vids about the Lorentz devices and codes but didn't remember until NOW! Some of the CODE-BREAKERS and builders of the those machines were incredible PEOPLE!
In Bletchley Park, on the premises of the Museum, there is a plaque commemorating Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, breaking the Enigma cipher as the first and their contribution to the success of British cryptologists and their contribution to the victory in World War II.
Signals Analysis and context helps immensely. Telegraph operators all have signature tells. Analysts learned who the lazy operators were. Standardized formats, send times, and ‘heil hitler’ in every message meant the British had all they needed to eventually solve any cypher.
Interesting and thanks, There's been several US' PBS docs about this issue. One or two of these docs told that encryption is in a wider sense. If you step back a bit what is being talked about in intellectual property or IP. There's been a couple of bits on CBS' 60 Minutes about this last issue too. As for the issues of WWII, I really don't know. The approach since cheap computers have been around, is to destroy the document after a short time as the notion is that it can be broken because of those computers. What is left then, why 007 hanging around in bars and gambling houses of course.
Tommy Flowers was given recognition for his work, and some money. However the money was less than his out of pocket expenses. His previous work was as a telecoms engineer, which is also my past.
That may still be classified. Germans did break the British Admiralty codes and the British new it. They noticed that when they re-routed their convoys they intercepted the Germans re-routing their submarines. It must have been quite a cat and mouse game. I only came across this in Clay Blair's books "The Hunters" and "The Hunted".
@@neilmanhard1341 I've looked up on it and seen the same, it appears they gave codes to individual admirals, fleets to then receive plain text and use flags rather then all the ships talking via radio. Reminds me of the axiom KISS, "Keep It Simple Stupid", no complex decryption, each ship has different codes for orders, then ofc you have orders like "sink the bismark" which didn't really need codes but specific orders like "arc goes to plum" meaning arc royal goes to the Atlantic possibly
Primarily the British used a machine called TYPEX, and the Americans used one called SIGABA. Both were rotor machines, but much more secure than Enigma. The Americans, and probably the British, too, used message handling procedures that avoided some features of German messages that were exploited. They, for instance, split a message in two, and sent the second part first. This avoided stereotyped beginning of messages, which were very useful in breaking Enigma keys. They also added nonsense text before and after the message, hence the phrase "the world wonders" that infuriated Halsey at Leyte Gulf.
A remarkable story and thank you for bringing it to our attention. I must disagree with your title though, 'Toughest code wasn't the Enigma" assuming it was the Lorenz Cipher. The Navajo Code Talkers accompanied the Marines as they moved across the Pacific battling the Japanese. They spoke clear Navajo to one another on the radios and then translated it to english to their counterpart or commanding officer in real time. TO THIS DAY, that code still hasn't been broken.
and why would someone need to break it today? did they keep using it or stop at the end of the war.also how would we know if it was ever broken. one of the biggest problems for the allies was not acting on intelligence as to not reveal that they had broken the codes.
Was a lesser known spoken language, not a code. Not suitable for coded message traffic. Example: What is the Navajo word for "San Francisco"? Answer: San Francisco. See my point?
@@dans.5745 nah that was the adopted english way to say it. The true code bit was they tended to not have words for things like tanks or guns and had an agreed upon words in their place. So cities could be described using a similar method because no person in europe spoke the language.
@@GodzillaofTokyo Julia, You are assuming that they had "special code" words for almost all the thousands of commonly used military terms. My point: Navajo language is just that, a language, not a code. Encoding message traffic back in WW2 required a WRITTEN language as baseline, for which code-words/letters/numbers would replace either words, phrases or letters & numbers. Navajo was used for rapid tactical short-range voice radio traffic, not the transmission of lengthy operational orders over long-distances.
@@dans.5745 Navajo Code Talkers, who CREATED A CODE based on the complex, unwritten Navajo language. The code primarily used word association by assigning a Navajo word to key phrases and military tactics.
Very interesting! I had heard that Hitler used Lorentz but I had also heard it was used for large amounts of data, e.g. order of battle and that you needed Teletypes and the like to to work on the data received. Was it used for small messages (like enigma) ?
The hardest code to break is the same now as it was then. That code is; what does my girlfriend/wife mean when she says she isn’t angry? The smartest minds still have no comprehension.
the people who made these computers would get whiplash from the fact we have processors that are millions of times smaller and better and yet we use the most bloated code
I would argue that the most difficult coding was not the Lorenz cipher machine. Because that was cracked. The coding of the German Reichsbahn, on the other hand, could not be broken at Bletchley Park during the war. The reason for this was not a particularly sophisticated cipher machine, but simply the technical language of the railwaymen (who still seem to live in a world that is incomprehensible to outsiders).
The Reichsbahn used a commercial Enigma K with rewired rotors and a rewired UKW. Enigma traffic from the Reichsbahn was first encountered by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park on 25 July 1940 and all messages were decrypted until the traffic ceased a month later, on 27 August 1940. The wiring was recovered cryptanalytically.
At the bottom of all this incredible codebreaking genius of the time, including _Enigma_ and _Lorenz_ was the advanced radio technology that allowed the English to receive these messages in the U. K. when the Germans did not believe they could. It was like hearing a broadcast band (550 to 1600 kc) broadcast in New York in Los Angeles. Moreover, the operators who copied the messages - Enigma transmitted in Morse and Lorenz in the equivalent of RTTY -were technically very skillful. No reception means no code breaking.
Also, one of the biggest issues with the Enigma was that many common general information messages would be sent. It is easy to decipher when every morning a radio point broadcasts the weather report over the north sea, or every year the entire German command sending a "Happy birthday, our Great Leader".
@@reginaldmcnab3265 Not really. US history books are full of lies written by Neo-Confederates after the Civil War. Where do you think Jim Crow laws and segregation laws came from? The people who lost the American Civil War. Hell, people repeat Nazi propaganda all the time. Not one German general ever called their own strategy "Blitzkrieg." Goebbels purely made it up. Japanese schools completely fail to teach about WWII. They don't even discuss the leaflets the Americans dropped warning people to leave before the fire-bombings and atomic bombs. They teach the bombs just fell for no reason. The US writes the narrative? Yet, everyone has heard of the My Lai Massacre and the damage Agent Orange did. People who typically believe "The Victors Write History" usually know very little about history and only want to justify Nazi war crimes, support theories that have no solid evidence and/or have lost all touch with reality and need some way to explain it.
@@chaosXP3RT propaganda is like poison, like propaganda poison is never 100 percent poison, it might be just 2 percent but it can be enough to kill. The US still say they don’t have an inch of territory of another country but yet they have taken nearly half of Mexico.
@@chaosXP3RT lol you're fooled. That's why usa and the Soviet had to become allies. And it took 6 countries to destroy Germany. Hitler was a damn monster for these allies. If the usa fought by themselves Germany would have kick their ass in just 2 hours
A good point is the error by the operations staff. A good crypto machine replicates a one time pad. When I was in the USAF, (1969-1973&, I respired the KW-26 crypto system designed in the 1950's for encrypting teletype signals. It was unbreakable as the code would take over 25 years to repeat, but had the same weakness if restarted. To try and eliminate that from happening the code selection was done with punched cards which the reader cut in half when the reader was closed.
You've missed an important part of the story. Flowers a working class self taught genius who left school at 16 was asked to build a mechanical decoding machine by these Cambridge professors He said he could do it but had a better idea. Instead of using mechanical switches he would use valves (vacuum tubes). He was so sure he used his own money to create Colossus. His machine was so fast in it calculations it was only limited by the speed of the data (a reel of punched paper) fed into it.
==============================
I see Flowers as being a British Patriot,
==============================
who gave his all.
We need some today,
as our country is invaded.
/
@@zen4men/_[]!#$%^&*()
My understanding is that valves were in very short supply. If there had been many more available, he could have designed a machine whch used valves to store the content of the paper tape and if he had, the speed of Colosus would be been defined by the time to clock in each stored frame to the processor the time to perform computations per frame. I suspect that the combination of these would have been have faster than the clock signal defined by the velocity of the paper tape (even though it was exceptionally fast).
As a footnote, Flowers was in German occupied territory when war was declared, and had he been detained as a British National on the border, the Colossus would not have existed. After the war, when Flowers wanted to build electronic exchanges, he was not allowed to refer to his war time experience. He was never compensated for the building of the Colossus.
@@michaeledwards2251
Government is full of mean people,
building a mean country.
/
Tommy Flowers was turned down by the military when he offered to build Colossus because they thought it impracticable due to all the valves. He build it anyway using his own money and the rest is history, thank goodness for men like Flowers.
Hear, hear! Tommy Flowers is the unsung hero of WW2 codebreaking. And he invented the computer, contrary to popular belief.
@@bertspeggly4428 he built one, but he wasn't first (and the idea was decades old at the time)
and after the war he proposed creating more computers... but he couldn't say why he thought they'd be useful
Sundhaug92, he built the world's first semi programmable electronic computer which to my knowledge was a first.
@@les5136 If your story is true, it's amazing. I'm very jealous! Maybe he was still silenced by the Official Secrets Act?
When I heard they were reading Soviet traffic my jaw dropped. I've studied the War for over 60 years and learn something new every day. Good Job!
yea, that does not suprise me on one level; but, on another, it does because it sure was not helping them on the eastern front.
Soviet radio "traffic" could be anything. Low level logistics or Admin traffic vs. high level headquarters traffic. Also the Soviets could have easily manufactured false traffic to keep the Germans fooled. Overall, the Germans signals intelligence did very little to help them fight the Soviets. The Soviets were also masters of deception, and had excellent sources within the German ranks telling the Soviets about German intell. Don't forget about all those German signal soldiers captured by the Soviets. The Soviets would not hesitate to torture them to talk.
The Soviets had captured Lorenz machines in the final days of the war in Europe. They put them to use, never considering that the Allies had access to the same technology, and were reading their mail. That's why the Lorenz information remained classified for such a long time.
@@user-nu1vn3yy9s There is little evidence for your claim. The Soviets used Lorenz for some time after WWII, which indicates either that they believed either:
i) That nobody else had captured a physical machine, and Russian cryptographers could not imagine it being recreated virtually.
ii) That the system was so robust that even if opposition cryptanalysts had access to a machine, no individual transmission could be decrypted.
iii) The western Allies had no knowledge of Lorenz, and could not crack it.
If they had believed otherwise, they would not have used Lorenz. They did use it, and NATO read their mail.
As for the use of one time pads: mid to high level bulk communications traffic is not encoded on one time pads. Military and diplomatic traffic is huge. Messages on one time pads are very short, of necessity. They also rely on being composed of truly random number sequences. Generating sufficient sequences would have been an impossible task at Mid C20th. Having a ready built and apparently unbreachable system to use everyday must have seemed like a Godsend.
It was more useful to know the general picture of what the Soviets were doing, than their top secrets.
The suggestion that the Soviets used captured Lorenz machines doesn't make sense as John Cairncross had been passing raw decrypts to his NKVD handler from 1943 onwards.
What was important wasn’t that a code was broken, it was preventing the enemy from realizing that fact.
I think on reflection you'll decide they are both important.
The Germans are pretty intellectual and appreciated that any code could be broken given enough time and resources.
With war messages time is of the essence, and if the enemy read the messages in clear text 2 or 3 weeks later, so what?
@@BasementEngineer Yes, of course they realised it could be broken. Why else would the navy have added extra wheels?
@@BasementEngineerthe germans were also nazis and killed lots of pilots by trying to make a plane bigger than the Lancaster dive(shallow) so don't Apply to much logic to them
@@gingernutpreacher Yes indeed. The Germans were sooo stupid that it took the ENTIRE capitalist and communist world almost 6 years to defeat that small European country.
Enigma was a code system for tactical use. There were 60000+ Enigma machines in the field.
Lorentz was a system for use at high levels. It was used on just 11 radio links among the high command.
@@user-nu1vn3yy9s The security of a cipher system does not depend on keeping the machine secret; it is assumed that the enemy has one. The security comes from the key.
@@user-nu1vn3yy9s Kerckhoff's principle dates to 1883; it is not a new idea. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle Of course, you don't hand your enemy your hardware, but your system must be designed so that if---when, really---they do get hold of one, it is still secure. The real reason to keep your machines secret is so that the enemy can't steal your technology and make their ciphers as good as yours. That's why the Americans would not let the British even see the outside of the SIGABA machine. And yes, that is practice as well as theory. Security by obscurity is a recipe for disaster.
@@user-nu1vn3yy9s You really don't understand this stuff at all. There is no contradiction. Go read what I wrote again; I won't bother repeating it.
@@user-nu1vn3yy9s _"" I won't bother repeating it." - it's so easy to decipher this attitude in your style of answering."_
Since you seem to be able to read the previous posts in this thread, I will repeat what I said before: "Kerckhoff's principle dates to 1883; it is not a new idea. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle Of course, you don't hand your enemy your hardware, but your system must be designed so that if---when, really---they do get hold of one, it is still secure. The real reason to keep your machines secret is so that the enemy can't steal your technology and make their ciphers as good as yours. That's why the Americans would not let the British even see the outside of the SIGABA machine. And yes, that is practice as well as theory. Security by obscurity is a recipe for disaster." Are you happy now?
_"You have little knowledge about real operations' history, so you repeat 1st year in college level of security principles."_
I have never taken a college course in security. I learned on the job.
_"By the way, so many companies don't want to publish the code of the soft they developed."_
Are you serious? You are equating---or is it confusing?---computer code and cryptology? Seriously? And you accuse me of knowing nothing about crypto.
@@user-nu1vn3yy9s _"Because in the same line of thinking the soft must be open-source, so ppl will correct the errors and point out vulnerabilities."_
What!!?? Are you seriously suggesting that governments ask their enemies to evaluate their crypto?
_"ZERO information."_
Exactly. Your posts contain precisely zero information. You are just stringing random words together in the hope that no one will notice that you have no idea what you are talking about.
I'm done wasting time on your trolling.
I'm learning so much from this dude this summer so he's basically now my virtual summer school teacher. 😂
Class is in session!
duh dude speaks like he has balls of sh*t in its mouth...Limey speak...SHEESH!
NEVER stop learning!
watch mark feltons channel. He is worth watching to.
@@thunberbolttwo3953 YES
Americans who speak in Indian tribal languages only they've ever heard about: 👀
Navajo WindTalkers!
Well there aren't exactly Navajo speakers elsewhere!
From what I remember from a book, french colonial troops didn't need to speak in code either.
No germans could understand their langage.
The more obscure the language, the better.
Makes me wonder whether fictional languages like LotR's Elvish and Star Wars' Mando'a could be pretty useful in war...
@@michaelandreipalon359 Or Star Trek's Klingon language.
The Enigma was broken in 1932 by three Polish mathematicians: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, who were employed by the Polish military Cipher Bureau. The first Polish copy of the military version of "Enigma" was built in the "Ava" factory in Warsaw in 1933. The process of putting the elements together took place in Pyry near Warsaw. From then on, Poles could read German military correspondence. In 1939, Poland handed over the Enigma documentation to the British.
after nazi/ ussr pact aug 23, "39 The Poles told the Brits {Everybody new} upcoming german invasion, and they had broken the code,,, Had they used the info ... ??? Who knows ???
Though the Poles were entirely dependent on information from a German traitor to read Enigma, and once this source was cut off, and more rotors added, the Poles were baffled, and only the British had the intellectual firepower to continue reading the messages.
@@dupplinmuir113 You are funny :))))))))))))))) and you talk nonsense that is inconsistent with documents and historical truth. Oh my god, where do people like this come from ? :))))))))))))))
That's why the British needed over 6,000 personnel to read that "simple" code, right?
It took time and resources to break the code, and with military messages, time was of the essence.
@@BasementEngineer They also put decoding on effectively a production line process; decoding and distributing thousands of messages per day.
Gordon Welchman's 'The Hut Six Story' gives a of detail.
Specific topic but I would love to see a vid on the 1st and 2nd battles of El Alamein. My great grandfather was in the Desert Rats and fought in both as well as Tobruk. I've watched Geestly's pretty much from the start and these 2 new channels will make a fine addition to my collection. Keep up the great work!
These should be nice, although The Front also needs to emphasize on the lesser known aspects of the battles too.
So would I, My grand-father was serving in North Africa in the RAF
@@michaelandreipalon359 yeah I agree
Watch TIK on North africa
WOW LRDG!! WOW
I’d never heard of this Code.
The problem with Enigma was it was not developed by Germany. It was created by civilians and then offered on the open market to anybody. So, Bletchley Park had a huge advantage when war broke out. Poland had made significant strides in exploiting Enigma’s vulnerabilities and was instrumental in starting BP on the road to breaking the code.
Dude. I'm honestly mind blown, this video was fantastic. I never knew the story of the Lorenz Cipher, TICOM, Colossus, and what the allies found during the collapse of Nazi Germany.
The TICOM files are now declassified and are on……the new TICOM website….on line….!
U were not told a lot of things......
The fact people dont know shows just how well the British did
That “brief word from our sponsor” was an epic that was longer than War and Peace mate
Code breakers: Exist
Lorenz Cipher: Hold my ink, paper, and pencils
no mention of the Polak mathematicians who provided proof of work in deciphering enigma to begin with
@@CBielski87 the unsung heroes of the unsung heroes we call, “Intelligence gathering.”
@@CBielski87 just you wait.....
Don't forget brainpower and patience.
@@CBielski87 I was expecting this. Lorenz had nothing to do with Enigma. For starters the Enigma used only capital letters and numbers, Lorenz used the teleprinter font similar to a modern keyboard, utilising upper and lower case, numbers and special characters. The Polish code breakers also got their hands on an Enigma machine in the '30's. Bill Tutt didn't see a Lorenz machine until after the war.
Laughs in Navajo.
lol good point
Hmm, a video about the code-talkers could be worthwhile.
Yes, initially I thought about the Navajo Code-Talkers.
Do you want to learn Hungarian?
@@jjammmees Let me Finnish first.
The front : behold the braved
Front that’s the seventh time this week that you brought the braved to show and Tell
BUT IT'S STILL COOL
How many times has there been show and tell.
@@BobO-qh2nx since Captain Tuttle was alive
ruclips.net/video/ieimw3a6Sow/видео.html
You could still buy the civilian version of the Enigma machine until the stock market crash of 1929, it'd been in use since 1926 invented by a Dutch inventor, as a machine to encode secret business information and was adopted in 1926 by the Weimar German army as their personal code.
I didnt know that. It was a commercially available machine? Guess I never really thought of where it came from, but i would never have guess it was like buying a very smart typewriter in an appliance store! Thanx for this info. :-)
Just reacently it went public that in Switzerland a company founded secretly by the USA sold engine like encryption machines to countries like Iran etc. The the selling point was the swiss neutrality. But those machines could decrypted by the US.
Enigma machine was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I
@@kirkc9643 Yes but Hugo Koch worked on and patented it first and transferred his patent to Scherbius having not built a machine himself
@@johnryder1713 Scherbius applied for a patent (filed 23 February 1918) for a cipher machine based on rotating wired wheels that is now known as a rotor machine. Over a year and a half later, Koch filed for his rotor machine patent on 7 October 1919.
Wind talkers.
Navaho language has no written counterpart, not a single wind talker message was ever broken.
The real secret of the code talkers is that it relies on racism. First, the colonial racism of the oppressors (US and Canada). The belief that aboriginal languages are somehow lesser, in extreme cases this attitude extends to other colonial languages (French, Spanish, etc.). Second, it requires the colonial racism of the opponent. The opponent already believes that your language is beneath them, and strangely that adopts your attitudes to other languages. Racists tend to take racist beliefs on uncritically, except for those associated with them of course.
It becomes quite clear when you examine what was done in Canada with the same sort of idea. Our version of code talkers was a little more informal, and didn't involve people of a particular nation. For example, in our case the Cree was the most common language used for code talking, which happens to the largest linguistic group in Canada. But both countries have much to answer for, since at the same time each country was operating residential schools where child abuse was rampant and speaking your own language was punished.
Chuck, do you need to get off Twitter for a little bit?
@@themilkman6969 I would need to create a Twitter account first. More of an old time rabble rouser, with a wobbly bent.
Well ... Navaho didn't have a written literature *at the time,* or a published grammar or dictionary. That was one of the important things about it, because Germany remembered the success of Choctaw code talkers in WWI, and sent spies to America as anthropologists to gather up records of Native languages. Diné Bizaad (which is the language's own name for itself) had not been documented yet. It has a perfectly good writing system nowadays.
Other things that made it a success: A relatively large speaker population, so that as many as 400 Navaho Marines could train as code talkers. A phonetic system with lotttttts of consonants that you can't easily tell apart if you grew up speaking German, or Italian, or Japanese (or English, or French, or Russian, or Chinese). And training with a codebook, so that even when the Japanese did capture and torture an untrained Navaho, he couldn't tell them anything. (If the message was "when can the grenade detail commit" the literal translation would be "weasel hen can bluejay potato deer tail come glove.")
You can check out the codebook here: www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/n/navajo-code-talker-dictionary.html
@@eritain There are sounds in the language that have no alphabetic equivalent such as glottal stops, grunts and clicks (sorry that's the best I can do because there is no equivalent).
It is like trying to write down exactly what a sneeze or a cough sounds like.
You can come close but sometimes slight differences in sound/timing change the meaning.
Cipher messages are always broken when the operators fail to use established protocols. The real importance people should take away from this video is that MATH is an important skill and not a racist western construct!
What as racism got to do with mathematics ?????????.
the fastest way into any secure system is the human element. Engineers have a hard time accounting for stupid when people are involved, even now.
western??? do you even know where math originated?
@@battlecruiserna yes, like getting an email saying you have inherited a lot of money, and give us your bank details lol. P.T. Barnum was correct !
How about established protocol saying that every message must begin with "XXXMESSAGEFROM" and everybody knows that?
"World war II was won with British brain, American brawn and Russian blood"
- Joseph Stalin
Grudgingly, I agree with the monster here.
Did Uncle Joe mention how much Russian blood was spilled to keep him in power?
Perhaps it slipped his mind...
@@kerriwilson7732 about 14Million more or less.
@@michaelandreipalon359 Stalin did nothing wrong.
and Stalin's stupidity, because he killed all his experienced military officers, just before the war started.
Even though the Nazis had all Soviet messages, they still lost.
The NKVD had done pretty well infiltrating and spying on their German counter parts and acquiring German informants.
also the soviets got almost every info the brits got...troop movements tactics and so on
Probably happened to late In the war to have mattered. Post Stalingrad for sure.
@@liampett1313 :D just imagine :sir new spy information...the soviets are coming...from the EAST
Regardless of how much intelligence you have on your opponent, if you don't possess the forces to react, then its only so much useless data. Future events will make your intelligence reports irrelevant. General Gehlen (army chief intelligence officer on the Eastern Front) wrote how frustrating this was. He was later employed by NATO. Some considered him as having the most knowledge on how the Soviet army operated and planned during the cold war. He makes some very interesting reading.
Colossus. A dimly remembered sci-fi movie about a computer that wants to rule the world and eventually becomes a human. But imagine the original. Taking up an entire room with maybe a few thousand vacuum tubes ( yes i know, thermionic valves) and operated by switches and plugs. And hotter then hell to be around.
Hmm, curious, I'll check it out.
It was called Colossus:The Forbin Project. (1970) Excellent first Sci-Fi about computers gaining sentience and omnipotent power. It's around on disc and streaming but make sure you get the print that runs 1:40, there was a hacked down TV print to run 90 minutes including commercials. Saw it when it came out and still love it.
@@itsjohndell Hmm, thanks.
There's a store told that the Naval female staff that operated it, as it was so warm, used it to dry their clothes.
If you want to see what colossus looked like there is a working full size replica at The National Museum of Computing Bletchley Park England, working every day the museum is open. Plus the Bombe used for getting the enigma wheel start settings. H Block was the worlds first computer room housing the Colossus machines. See the web site www.tnmoc.org/ Better still come visit if you can or take a virtual tour.
One of the reasons that I looked in on this particular story is that I use stories like these the re-establish broken memory links. A stroke left me with minimal physical damage, but my Memory Cathedral looks rather like Notre Dame d'Paris. This story was one of those that especial invokes memories for me: a misspent youth, a love for puzzles and math. All that and add in a penchant for artificial intelligence, and a fan of Alan Turing, boy genius.
My reaction to this video was best described as warm familiarity. I would describe my level of knowledge of cryptography as high amateur, but not that required of a cryptographer. Over and over, the reaction as you told the story your way, I found myself thinking "Ok, x needs to be talked about" and you talked about "x." Divergences from my personal expectations were of the "difference of opinion" sort.
The Lorenz cipher machine is the exception. While much of what you said is largely accurate, a little specialist knowledge is applicable. In 1970s the pop culture book contained enough information about Lorenz to cause interest, and in the Comp Sci community there was the vague description of the box that cracked it. When the security deadline passed, the code breaking community (amateur and professional) had more of a "whose conjecture was accurate" attitude.
There was no keyboard attached to the Lorenz machine. Messages would be typed-up on a standard teleprinter (aka teletype) and punched onto paper tape. This tape was then fed through a tape-reader connected to the Lorenz machine. The cypher machine then combined each character from the tape with a "key" character created by the internal wheels to create a new character which was different from either of those two. The enciphered message was then transmitted by landline or radio to the receiving station.
At the receiving station the enciphered message was punched into paper tape which was then fed through another Lorenz machine. As long as both Lorenz machines had identical wheel settings the output of the second machine was the plain-text which could then be printed out on a teleprinter.
Once the Bletchley Park codebreakers had worked out the internal arrangement of the Lorenz machine (which was an amazing achievement) "all" that was needed to decypher messages was to work out the original wheel settings. This is what Colossus was built to do, by being able to test a range of possible settings at very high speed and then using statistical analysis of the result to determine the probability of each being the correct one. Once the wheel settings had been discovered the message was actually decyphered and printed-out using a different machine known as a "British Tunny".
da: And all this took how long?
And Arne Beurling cracked the Siemens & Halske T52 in two weeks on pen and paper, twice. That's why he got Albert Einsteins office at Princeton after Einsteins passing. Did Turing get that?
No he chemically castrated i believe thats england everyone
Absolutely fascinating. I knew about Enigma, but not about Lorenz. And pretty damn amazing how the Lorenz cipher was broken.
So grateful that someone remembers Tom Flowers.
Tutte became a Felow of the Royal Society and was famous (In UK) Tommy Flowers was an engineer from the GPO (General Post Office) but was never fully recognised because of his strong Cockney accent which he never lost.
My wife's grandfather worked with him at Dollis Hill. They were very good friends
And this is why, nerds are useful.
Yes
Nerds are always useful.
Are you trying to pretend that YOU are useful?
@@TheFront Yes. Which is why we have two world wars.
@@TheFront Too old to be too useful. 67 years old and counting.
The team led by Tommy Flowers who built the Colossus were at the Post Office Research Station which was in Brook Road, Dollis Hill, London. My late father worked on the optical reader for the punched paper tapes. Nobody who worked on the Colossus said a word about it until some information was accidentally released in the USA in the 1970s, and nobody said much until the 2000s. The big secret was that UK intelligence could crack the Lorenz code; many countries' diplomatic and intelligence services were still using similar equipment many years later in the belief that it was totally secure. The research station was moved to Martlesham in Suffolk in the 1970s and the Dollis Hill buildings were demolished and built over. On the new estate one of the roads is called Flowers Close.
Arne Beurling from Sweden broke the code of the G-schriber with 10 wheels in 14 nights by himself!
You just said "the Brits have been listening since the Brits started listening"
XD
The Poles were the first to crack it and even handed the Brits an Enigma machine
Well researched and very well presented. I have read hundreds and hundreds of books on military history and watched hundreds of documentaries but you always learn something new. Thank you. Looking forward to more of your excellent documentaries.
The most important part of the Lorenz Cipher was the fact that it connected to teletypes. You can type up an extremely long message, several pages in length, walk over to your Lorenz Cipher machine, set up the rotors, make radio contact with the receiving station then feed in the punched paper tape and it would encrypt and send the whole thing in less than a minute. In the last full month of the war in Europe, over 8 MB of data was sent encrypted using the Lorenz cipher. Bletchley Park was able to read all of it.
The Enigma was Ultra portable but it was slow. The Lorenz machine was less portable but capable of handling much higher volume.
Arne Beurling to FRA: Someone said Geheimschreiber? Please hold my snappsglas, and give me a pen and paper. Oh, you switched to Lorenz because we read all your messages. That's cute.
Now my only question is did the Soviets get their hands on some of this equipment and if so how much?
They most likely captured it & presumably Russian-supporting Germans (yes, there were some) in the signalling service showed them how to use it. Being able to listen in on Nazi high command signals would be a great advantage in the dying days of the war.
In the post-war period, I assume that the Russians used Lorenz thinking that it was unbroken & unbreakable, little realising that the British & Americans were reading it like a book. Russian ambitions in Europe were identified as a grave threat to Western powers well before the end of WW2.
Karl Dönitz had four-rotor (M4) Enigma machines (Triton) put onboard U-Boats and other Kriegsmarine vessels from late 1941 - Station X called this new cypher SHARK - allied code breakers were unable to read U-Boat communications during early to mid 1942 unless the M4 Enigma had to encode "backwards compatible" to a 3 three rotor enigma machine
The real goal began after the code was broken: Making sure the enemy isn't aware that the code's compromised.
Another weakness that allowed Lorenz to be cracked was a Japanese diplomat sending some of the messages encrypted with Lorenz back to Japan in a much weaker encryption. Lorenz does not change the length of a message, so with a bit of clever guessing, the two versions could be found together. So the British also had a few messages in an unencrypted and an encrypted version to work with.
The swedish matematician Arne (Karl-August) Beurling cracked this by hand during the war , he stands statue at the swedish counter intelligence centre at FRA
Wow ,very intressting to see Kolossos .I didn't thought something like this already existed back then .
Tommy Flowers was the unsung hero of this process, I believe he even funded this enormity (or maybe partially funded it - memory plays games with me sometimes) himself. A truly brilliant engineer all but forgotten in the Alan Turing publicity roundabout. Tutte seems to have been similarly brushed out of the picture. Wonder why???
Because of the Official Secrets act. Not all the Colossus where broken up, two went off to what is now GCHQ and a third is rumoured to have gone to Manchester University to be the start of the Manchester Baby en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby
Tommy Flowers went off back to Dollis Hill to the Post Office Research Station. Tommy was at the switch on of the Rebuild with Tony Sale and HRH Duke of Kent
www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/rebuild.htm
@@johndunn4162 Thanks for this John. I hope he found some satisfaction in belated and inadequate show of appreciation. Should have been Sir Thomas Flowers at the very least - seems that's kept for more important folk such as footballers and singers eh!?
I visited Bletchley Park in 2003 to mark a Polish gathering there (I'm not Polish but I had Brit-Polish mates) complete with open-air Catholic mass. Polish were cracking the code initially before the Nazis added a fourth wheel to the machine.
And before they stopped double encrypting the position the operator had chosen.
The Poles were important to Enigma but over stated .
Just goes to show that there's always 1 Guy that couldn't follow instructions.
Don't be that guy.
Which means that there is no such thing as an unbreakable code.
my dad was in the signals and joined the GPO after the war, he used to mention Tommy Flowers a lot i think he was well kown in telecom circles but maybe not by the the general public
AMAZING! So much devoted to the Enigma Device and now to learn about the Lorentz device which was far more complicated!
Enigma was not broken by Turing or any UK scientist. Learn first...
there's no point in discussing, english propaganda gave all of credit to Turing and their books only mention him.
Ah yes. Nerds have helped build society in the background.
And in many cases saved us in the background.
The unsung heroes.
In war, intelligence is everything.
Making the code harder was clanging the original A equal 1 .Do this then switching numbers g egual 18 and giving other letters from g to m a random set of numbers .The adding wheels on enigma spins a new set of codes each time .
I'd love to see a piece done on Green Hornet / SIGSALY including how they synchronised the record players between England and the U.S that had the white noise crib on which encoded and decoded the telephone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt.
Truly some amazing humans working at Bletchley Park during WW2. The stories about that group never cease to amaze.
The German had their equivalent and were breaking various operational codes used by the allies. However the codes where Egnima information was transmitted was more complex and never broken.
We had our own Enigma-like machines that the Germans sporadically worked on breaking, but never could. They thought it was impossible, and that was partly the reason they were confident that Enigma was safe. From what I've read, our machines were actually better and didn't have some of the Enigma's flaws. I don't know if our procedures were better or more rigorously adhered to.
@@kentix417 The Germans knew that given enough time and resources any code could be broken.
Why do you think they had different levels of encryption such as 3, rotor, 4 rotor, and Lorenz machines.
To decrypt this stuff took TIME, and for military information time is of the essence. 2 or 3 weeks from transmission the message may well be worthless. That's why the Germans did not spend too much time decrypting messages.
Please do a video on the boers during ww1 and ww2 and the grensoorlog
I have spent a lot of time watching and reading about Bletchley Park, Turing, Enigma, and, crucially, "the Tiltman Break," the astounding mathematical achievements of Bill Tutte first working out the machine architecture from the key string obtained from the break, and subsequently (with a possible hint from Alan Turing, of course!) the detection of double letters and spaces, which is what Colossus did, and of course the groundbreaking engineering of Tommy Flowers. All that said, this was by far the best 6 or 7-minute summary of the whole thing I've ever seen. The icing for me was the TICOM discussion. I had never heard that before! And, to answer your question, no -- Tutte was only able to work out the rotors by analyzing the bits from the key string obtained from the break, plus the luck that it was a relatively long message (some 4,000 characters). HQIBPEXEZMUG!
Lorenz messages, as with Enigma, could only be decyphered if they were sent by radio. Land line transmissions were safe.
Didn’t Swedish Arne Beurling crack the T52 similar to the Lorentz in 1940 he did it in two weeks with pen and paper a feat later replicated by Bill Tutte ?? And Swedish telephone company Eriksson built a T52 analogue machines[3] that could decode the messages once the key settings had been found by hand? They knew about operation Barbarossa before it even happened and tried to worn russia without saying they had cracked the Germans code but Russia would not listen. Right me if I’m wrong😅 beside that great video 👏ps fun fact Arne beurling went to From 1954 he was professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, where he took over Albert Einstein's office.
The hardest codes probably went to the Native American codes created during the war. Probably because the Axis powers had little knowledge of Native languages. (I'm making a guess before I watch the video)
Nah, SIGABA. You litterally need a modern computer to crack it.
I agree. Is it/was it even a written language? Only a few thousand people in the world spoke it, and they all lived in N. America and they created words specifically for the war like for "tanks", "artillery", etc..words that have no meaning in Navajo. In addition, except for maybe some other Native American languages, it doesn't belong to any "family of languages". Unlike English which is a Germanic language in the Indo-European family. It had to sound like gibberish to the Japanese radio operators.
Arguably though, that's not a code, but a different language. If you don't know German and you hear someone speaking German, they're not exactly trying to hide something, you just can't understand them. That's probably why he didn't pull them up for the "hardest codes to crack". Because it ain't a code.
Now, encrypting an obscure language, now THAT'S gonna be a pretty tough one to crack.
@@daddysempaichan Navajo Code Talkers, who CREATED A CODE based on the complex, unwritten Navajo language. The code primarily used word association by assigning a Navajo word to key phrases and military tactics.
I highly recommend computerphiles videos on the Lorenz, it shows how the machine was broken in high detail. The basic idea is that the Lorenz wheels generate a 5-bit stream that the characters input are xor-ed with. This means that in theory for each character you have to be guess the message key for the number of combinations increases by 32... but if you have two different messages with the same key, where they are different you get the two inputs xor-ed... and you can use that to gradually get the messages out (whenever you make a guess for one input, if you're right you should get German out for the other input)
I really love these "alternative history" vids. Makes you wonder how things might have turned out in a different universe.
The toughest code to beak in the history of the world is trying to understand what my girlfriend is saying
You hear what she's saying, you just don't understand what she REALLY means!
Wow, where did you dig this up at?! I have never heard of any other encoding system used by Germany other than Enigma. I always believed it was the ultimate system. Lorenz is I name I'll have to remember.
Pretty well known actually, nice video explaining the cracking of Lorenz but nearly each history book about that era will mention the Lorenz as much if not even more than the Enigma machine.
Enigma story is just more interesting because of what ended up happening to Turing. And the idea of the turning test. So it lived on. Plus...the cold war info didnt get released till post 2000
Yes, the story of cracking Enigma became public 25 years sooner. The early bird gets the worm.
They also used the one time pad. A long dead pigeon was found in a chimney in Britain recently carrying a one-time pad encrypted message. Even with today's technology, it could not be decrypted.
You might do a video on the one-time-pad encoding that the Allies used to distribute Enigma intercepts. As long as all the procedures are followed, those cannot be broken.
I live near Rosenheim - and had no clue about such past stories there... thanks for sharing! ^_^
I remember in a documentary by Jeremy Clarkson where he mentioned this code.
Check out the improvised gun racks at 8:30
Best thumbnail of 2021
When I was in high school electronics class, we learned about colossus, but Not this. Years later in computer tech school, we went over colossus again. We had trouble learning anything about why/for what about it. Now I know why......
I wonder if any of these geniuses could tell us what Gerald on Clarkson's farm is talking about.
*Thats cool, but ask the Japanese to decrypt the Navajo encryptions*
The Japanese didn’t speak Navajo language
@@UnknownUser-xb1mp that’s the joke
@@UnknownUser-xb1mp that's........ the point.
Enigma was used for field tactical operations, logistics and administrative communications traffic while Lorenz was used for strategic operations. Logistics and administrative communications traffic for high command and control……and, enigma had been designed to be portable while Lorenz was designed to be installed due to its enhanced complexity and size.
Yes, Lorenz was never going to be a replacement for Enigma. It was not portable. You couldn't throw it in your truck and hit the road for field operations.
That last part made me think about the deciphering by Germans on the Allies transmissions as well as Japan. Well, basically everyone else. What we normaly don't hear. It's mainly Enigma, Enigma, Enigma, possibly Lorenz, that's it.
The British used a similar teletype machine to Enigma called Typex. The Germans knew about Typex and captured one either in Norway or Dunkirk. But because they thought Enigma was uncrackable they never tried to break it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typex#:~:text=In%20the%20history%20of%20cryptography,that%20greatly%20increased%20its%20security.
@@johndunn4162 Neither Enigma nor Typex (nor SIGABA) used teleprinters.
The Hut 6 Story....Gordon Welchman... Great book.
Can you do a second part on how they used it in the cold war ?
I liked for the thumbnail , but Video was solid too , good job, learned something new as well
Right off the bat you are wrong ! Lorenz WAS broken by hand but it took too long
The American SIGABA machine was unbreakable until supercomputers were developed.
Lol that's why they had to become allies with the Soviet to destroy Germany
A Vernam cypher with a random one time tape is still unbreakable no matter how super the computer is.
The Inigma machine used by the navy had 4 rotors
i think it originally had two, then a third added. Admiral karl doenitz was getting suspicious near the end of the war and ordered a fourth wheel installed.
@@STScott-qo4pw No, the naval Enigma had four rotors from early on. The army and air force machines always had three rotors.
@@michaelsommers2356 The navy had eight rotors, but the machines only operated with three until February 1942 when the submarine service rolled out an enigma machine with four rotors. That resulted in nearly a year of no submarine decodes until the US 4 unit bombe designed by Joe Desch and made by NCR helped break the traffic.
@@JimWatt Clearly what I meant was that the naval Enigma used four rotors at a time, while the army and air force used three. It should be noted that the extra rotor was not interchangeable with the original rotors, and did not in fact rotate during use. Also, the blackout ended when the new rotors were stolen, not when the four-rotor bombes became available, starting in May '43.
I had SEEN vids about the Lorentz devices and codes but didn't remember until NOW! Some of the CODE-BREAKERS and builders of the those machines were incredible PEOPLE!
The 1.6^19 is just different starting positions for the wheels. The actual total number of combination is substantially bigger - 10^169
In Bletchley Park, on the premises of the Museum, there is a plaque commemorating Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, breaking the Enigma cipher as the first and their contribution to the success of British cryptologists and their contribution to the victory in World War II.
Signals Analysis and context helps immensely. Telegraph operators all have signature tells. Analysts learned who the lazy operators were. Standardized formats, send times, and ‘heil hitler’ in every message meant the British had all they needed to eventually solve any cypher.
Interesting and thanks, There's been several US' PBS docs about this issue. One or two of these docs told that encryption is in a wider sense. If you step back a bit what is being talked about in intellectual property or IP. There's been a couple of bits on CBS' 60 Minutes about this last issue too. As for the issues of WWII, I really don't know. The approach since cheap computers have been around, is to destroy the document after a short time as the notion is that it can be broken because of those computers. What is left then, why 007 hanging around in bars and gambling houses of course.
Tommy Flowers was given recognition for his work, and some money. However the money was less than his out of pocket expenses. His previous work was as a telecoms engineer, which is also my past.
how on earth did the allies incrypt there messages?
That may still be classified. Germans did break the British Admiralty codes and the British new it. They noticed that when they re-routed their convoys they intercepted the Germans re-routing their submarines. It must have been quite a cat and mouse game. I only came across this in Clay Blair's books "The Hunters" and "The Hunted".
@@neilmanhard1341 I've looked up on it and seen the same, it appears they gave codes to individual admirals, fleets to then receive plain text and use flags rather then all the ships talking via radio. Reminds me of the axiom KISS, "Keep It Simple Stupid", no complex decryption, each ship has different codes for orders, then ofc you have orders like "sink the bismark" which didn't really need codes but specific orders like "arc goes to plum" meaning arc royal goes to the Atlantic possibly
1. Change codes often.
2. Translate into an obscure language (no written form) and then tie that language into knots.
Primarily the British used a machine called TYPEX, and the Americans used one called SIGABA. Both were rotor machines, but much more secure than Enigma. The Americans, and probably the British, too, used message handling procedures that avoided some features of German messages that were exploited. They, for instance, split a message in two, and sent the second part first. This avoided stereotyped beginning of messages, which were very useful in breaking Enigma keys. They also added nonsense text before and after the message, hence the phrase "the world wonders" that infuriated Halsey at Leyte Gulf.
As far as I know, the US used the Navajo language in the Pacific, but that might have only been for spoken telephone communications, and not written
A remarkable story and thank you for bringing it to our attention. I must disagree with your title though, 'Toughest code wasn't the Enigma" assuming it was the Lorenz Cipher. The Navajo Code Talkers accompanied the Marines as they moved across the Pacific battling the Japanese. They spoke clear Navajo to one another on the radios and then translated it to english to their counterpart or commanding officer in real time. TO THIS DAY, that code still hasn't been broken.
and why would someone need to break it today? did they keep using it or stop at the end of the war.also how would we know if it was ever broken. one of the biggest problems for the allies was not acting on intelligence as to not reveal that they had broken the codes.
Dont forget Wilhelm Canaris was supplying codes to the British.
I love learning about the similarities and parallels of IT OpSec of yesteryear and today!
The toughest code was the "Wind Talkers": IMO
Was a lesser known spoken language, not a code. Not suitable for coded message traffic. Example: What is the Navajo word for "San Francisco"? Answer: San Francisco. See my point?
@@dans.5745 nah that was the adopted english way to say it. The true code bit was they tended to not have words for things like tanks or guns and had an agreed upon words in their place. So cities could be described using a similar method because no person in europe spoke the language.
@@GodzillaofTokyo it was still a code so that unless you knew it speaking navajo wasn't enough.
@@GodzillaofTokyo Julia, You are assuming that they had "special code" words for almost all the thousands of commonly used military terms. My point: Navajo language is just that, a language, not a code. Encoding message traffic back in WW2 required a WRITTEN language as baseline, for which code-words/letters/numbers would replace either words, phrases or letters & numbers. Navajo was used for rapid tactical short-range voice radio traffic, not the transmission of lengthy operational orders over long-distances.
@@dans.5745 Navajo Code Talkers, who CREATED A CODE based on the complex, unwritten Navajo language. The code primarily used word association by assigning a Navajo word to key phrases and military tactics.
hardest code broken.Hardest 2 break was definitely the Cherokee SHAEF &
Navajo in S.Pacific,precedented by WWI Choctaw code talkers
No code its just a different language
@@tobiaszistler tell that 2 the IJA & Wehrmacht
@@curtiskretzer8898 your answer doesnt make any sense
@@curtiskretzer8898 they used native americans and their language for Radio operation but there werent a lot mostly they used an enigma like maschine
@@tobiaszistler IJA=Imperial Japanese Army.Wehrmacht=German Army.(am sure u will still have certain confusions)
Very interesting! I had heard that Hitler used Lorentz but I had also heard it was used for large amounts of data, e.g. order of battle and that you needed Teletypes and the like to to work on the data received. Was it used for small messages (like enigma) ?
This channel needs to rise the ranks of the youtube history channels
The hardest code to break is the same now as it was then. That code is; what does my girlfriend/wife mean when she says she isn’t angry?
The smartest minds still have no comprehension.
I like how Soviets were cracking German encryption machines: With tanks and Red Army
And a lot of allies.
@@alastair9446 forces, manpower and number of enemy soldiers neutralized is 9:1 ratio between USSR and the rest of the allies combined
the people who made these computers would get whiplash from the fact we have processors that are millions of times smaller and better and yet we use the most bloated code
I would argue that the most difficult coding was not the Lorenz cipher machine. Because that was cracked.
The coding of the German Reichsbahn, on the other hand, could not be broken at Bletchley Park during the war. The reason for this was not a particularly sophisticated cipher machine, but simply the technical language of the railwaymen (who still seem to live in a world that is incomprehensible to outsiders).
The Reichsbahn used a commercial Enigma K with rewired rotors and a rewired UKW. Enigma traffic from the Reichsbahn was first encountered by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park on 25 July 1940 and all messages were decrypted until the traffic ceased a month later, on 27 August 1940. The wiring was recovered cryptanalytically.
That thumbnail is literally the first time I laughed at that meme.
Not "lorens", The correct pronounciation of Lorenz is almost the same as that of the English "Lawrence".
I just realized I was watching you for months without being subscribed! Please forgive my heresy!
At the bottom of all this incredible codebreaking genius of the time, including _Enigma_ and _Lorenz_ was the advanced radio technology that allowed the English to receive these messages in the U. K. when the Germans did not believe they could. It was like hearing a broadcast band (550 to 1600 kc) broadcast in New York in Los Angeles. Moreover, the operators who copied the messages - Enigma transmitted in Morse and Lorenz in the equivalent of RTTY -were technically very skillful.
No reception means no code breaking.
I think if they switched to all Lorenz it would have been broken sooner. More machines means more chances one of them gets captured by allies.
Also, one of the biggest issues with the Enigma was that many common general information messages would be sent. It is easy to decipher when every morning a radio point broadcasts the weather report over the north sea, or every year the entire German command sending a "Happy birthday, our Great Leader".
And still it was so difficult to defeat German!
Germany spent most of the war on defense than offense. Not great for the "Superior race" that declared war on over half the world.
The history is written by the victors, who themselves has a long history of invading and attacking other countries
@@reginaldmcnab3265 Not really. US history books are full of lies written by Neo-Confederates after the Civil War. Where do you think Jim Crow laws and segregation laws came from? The people who lost the American Civil War. Hell, people repeat Nazi propaganda all the time. Not one German general ever called their own strategy "Blitzkrieg." Goebbels purely made it up. Japanese schools completely fail to teach about WWII. They don't even discuss the leaflets the Americans dropped warning people to leave before the fire-bombings and atomic bombs. They teach the bombs just fell for no reason.
The US writes the narrative? Yet, everyone has heard of the My Lai Massacre and the damage Agent Orange did.
People who typically believe "The Victors Write History" usually know very little about history and only want to justify Nazi war crimes, support theories that have no solid evidence and/or have lost all touch with reality and need some way to explain it.
@@chaosXP3RT propaganda is like poison, like propaganda poison is never 100 percent poison, it might be just 2 percent but it can be enough to kill.
The US still say they don’t have an inch of territory of another country but yet they have taken nearly half of Mexico.
@@chaosXP3RT lol you're fooled. That's why usa and the Soviet had to become allies. And it took 6 countries to destroy Germany. Hitler was a damn monster for these allies. If the usa fought by themselves Germany would have kick their ass in just 2 hours
A good point is the error by the operations staff. A good crypto machine replicates a one time pad. When I was in the USAF, (1969-1973&, I respired the KW-26 crypto system designed in the 1950's for encrypting teletype signals. It was unbreakable as the code would take over 25 years to repeat, but had the same weakness if restarted. To try and eliminate that from happening the code selection was done with punched cards which the reader cut in half when the reader was closed.
Wow this is the first I have heard of this Cypher machine