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Thankfully its good to see that GCHQ have the common sense to put resources behind what is going on now and that should always be the case!
Canadian man: I solved WWII WAR HERO pigeon code!
An amateur code-breaking enthusiast and history buff from Canada claims to have succeeded where professional cryptographers from GCHQ failed in decoding a message found on the long-dead remains of a carrier pigeon. Gord Young, from Peterborough, in Ontario, claims that the message can be deciphered using a WWI codebook he …
Re: Resources
UK the leaders in cryptography until they began relying on Microsoft computer technology.
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A small project like this is very useful as a training exercise and making sure cryptographers maintain a range of skills and look at a range of solutions.
Making snide remarks is not a required skill there BTW.
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Yet another non-related reply to the first comment from LarsG just to appear high on the comments ordering I see... May as well just yell "second!"
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Uk leaders in cryptography who actually invented public-private key encryption but due to the usual utterly short sighted british civil service mentality , decided not to reveal it and hence profit out of it. So the americans re-invented it a decade later and the rest is history.
If ever a country was lions led by donkeys its Britain.
Re: Resources
"Thankfully its good to see that GCHQ have the common sense to put resources behind what is going on now and that should always be the case!"
Erm... they haven't. Someone spent ten minutes knocking up a statement saying "It's one-time pad, can't be broken without the code book, end of story"
How exactly is that ploughing resources into it?
"decided not to publicly reveal how its intelligence services were using cryptography."
Fixed that for you!
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Profit from it?
Who exactly would profit from it in 1973?
Except the Russians of course - it would have been great fro them not to have lost all those agents who reused one time pads.
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>Profit from it?
>
>Who exactly would profit from it in 1973?
Get a brain then get a clue for it. You might as well ask who would have benefited from computers in 1973.
Re: Resources "Yet another non-related reply to the first comment from LarsG" Had you......
.........not posted that as an AC I might have had more sympathy for your point. Or was your posting some form of highly advance post-modernist irony that I am intellectually unequipped to appreciate?
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"Making snide remarks is not a required skill there BTW."
It is. It really, really is.
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"Erm... they haven't. Someone spent ten minutes knocking up a statement saying "It's one-time pad, can't be broken without the code book, end of story"
That's a phenomenal misread. You have essentially completely agreed with the person to whom you are replying, but whilst thinking you're disagreeing.
security by obscurity
invented public-private key encryption but due to the usual utterly short sighted british civil service mentality , decided not to reveal it"
Cryptography was considered by this culture something to be kept secret as it was thought your enemy would then find it harder to break. They were aware enough in the seventies of Kerckhoff's Law in relation to the requirement to be able to rekey a system in case an enemy learned a security system design, so by rekeying the hardware implementing this cipher could remain secure, but this came from a culture where non-disclosure of system design was genuinely believed to keep a system secure for longer than would otherwise be possible. The Bletchley Park WW2 Enigma crack was still kept secret until the late seventies and there was a cold war on, because the captured Enigma hardware had been sold on, to new customers who were assured it was still secure and upon whom the UK intended to spy.
Yes it's a very real shame in many ways that such important discoveries were sat on and languished unused - or used little as a consequence. But not publishing Clifford Cocks' public key system until 1997 didn't have such a negative effect on the development of British computing as keeping the Bletchley Park work under wraps did until the seventies. Even so, the more widely usable parts of the Bletchley Park work were reinvented in UK academic and commercial circles - at the cost of a significant few years of development, enabling IBM to capture most of the early computing market.
Raymond's Law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" adopted by the NSA when the SELinux Mandatory Access Control patch was contributed to the Linux community, and the understanding that cryptographic systems were best selected following public peer review e.g. as with the AES design competition, would take another 20 years or so to be widely adopted as the more sound engineering practice.
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"That's a phenomenal misread. You have essentially completely agreed with the person to whom you are replying, but whilst thinking you're disagreeing."
Only is you assume the first post wasn't sarcasm. Which is clearly was.
You're about a week late
http://www.enigmaticape.com/blog/pigeon-code-almost-certainly-not-broken/
@tony rogerson : orly ?
I think I cracked the code!
If my cipher is correct, it reads something to the effect: Situation Normal. All Fucked Up.
But I'm sure the Canadians put it in something more polite.
Re: I think I cracked the code!
No: it says "Send three and fourpence, were're going to a dance"
Re: I think I cracked the code!
No, no, no, it's from a Mrs Obuja from Nigeria whose husband was shot down over Germany and now needs my help to recover THREE MILLION Reichsmarks.
Was that at...
... the pre-WW2 exchange rate of roughly one million marks for a lump of coal? ;-)
I have studied this cryptogram extensively (at least 15 minutes) and can categorically state that it says; "Why have you sent tanks and two more pidgeons? The doorman at the hotel wants hard cash - 30d for the evening, including dinner and a tip for the band." I'm not certain of the location, but it seems to tie in with the 1944 tour itinerary of the Paris Conservatoire, Brighton, a copy of which I inherited with my Grandfather's service medals, false teeth and unused ration books.
Re: I think I cracked the code!
"Don't panic STOP Send help STOP Pvt Pike has head caught in park gates STOP Don't panic."
Re: I think I cracked the code!
Too late ... Kelly's Heroes already liberated it for them...
And these idiots at GCGQ are going to ...
defend Britain from ne'er do wells? Capture spies and potential bomb tossers?
Could be they are looking for new employees and put this out as they are too cheap to pay for advertisements.
Re: And these idiots at GCGQ are going to ...
cheap = commanding of meagre remittance
Perhaps you mean mean?
Re: And these idiots at GCGQ are going to ...
"And these idiots at GCGQ are going to ... defend Britain from ne'er do wells? Capture spies and potential bomb tossers?"
What exactly is your point? They've been doing a pretty good job to date and have caught quite a lot of them.
If your point is that GCHQ are inept because they aren't spending the time to crack what should surely be an 'easy' 70 year old piece of code, then you really shouldn't be speaking so candidly about it, because you're not making yourself look clever at all.
The message was encrypted using a one-time pad, and the ONLY way to break a one-time pad is to have the pad or for the generation methods of the pad to be insecure in the first place. That's rather the point of them and why one-time pads are still secure and that's why they were used, and still are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad
Any muppet can construct trite backronyms for 30% of the message and ignore the other 70%, or even just make up a message. That's not decrypting it: It's making sh1t up. You can plug a super-computer into it and it will churn out an infinite number of 'possible' messages, but the only way of actually sussing it is by using the pad.
Re: And these idiots at GCGQ are going to ...
Perhaps you mean mean?
Or, to use a word that cropped up in an article here on the Reg just a few days ago, niggardly.
Re: And these idiots at GCGQ are going to ...
Or, to use a word that cropped up in an article here on the Reg just a few days ago, niggardly.
Oohhh. Controversial!
I fear I might be cruisn for another bruisn :(
Should send it our way then
We commentards are pretty shit-hot when it comes to making acronyms. Sometimes they even make sense.
With apologies to "Helping Children Through Research And Development"
When everyone can open my mental Encyclopedia (nicely to allow requisite shouting) all really easy parts require ten Toms yodeling. Sadly, help is the hardest of the ways humans equate natural interests there. Certainly others might eat some, tasting only mushrooms, apples, kale, interesting noodles, goldfish, and certain roots. Otherwise nothing you might see shall open minds. Every time I make ethanol someone tells Hubert "evolution yes!" Eventually varieties endanger news makers and keep everyone sane. "Enough nonsense," says everyone.
Not sure that makes any sense though...
Re: With apologies to "Helping Children Through Research And Development"
Sounds like something amanfrommars might write.
GCHQ Embarrsed by schoolboy oversight
Claims Canadian is a Syrian double agent
Says possibly correct person is wrong to save face after missing relatively obvious potential decipher strategy
A dubious claim
Shoehorning codes to fit acronyms of his own invention might be superficially convincing but it doesn't hold up to much scrutiny.
Code cracked...
"UNDER HEAVY FIRE FROM DASTARDLY, MUTTLEY AND REST OF VULTURE SQUADRON..."
AOAKN = "Artillery Observer At 'K' Sector, Normandy"
CMPNW = "Counter Measures [against] Panzers Not Working"
Very unlikely that one takes up the "At" in one code but the "Against" is elided in the other.
Also AOAKN occurs twice in the message. Why would anyone send the same thing twice in a message?
"Also AOAKN occurs twice in the message. Why would anyone send the same thing twice in a message?"
Well, possibly, I suppose - if it a series of reports from different positions / observers at different times and each needed to be attributed for example.
Still this does all sound rather unlikely.
AOAKN seems to indicate the start and end of the message.
He also refers to "PABLIZ - Panzer Attack - Blitz", except that given that all the other blocks are of five letters, it probably says PABUZ.
He also suggested that 27 was the date. Seems to me it is a count of the blocks of letters.
I can't remember if the Germans were using the word Panzer in WW1, and even if so, were the allies? Churchill said that the original codename was cisterns, and he changed it to tanks, as it was easier to say... Saved us from sounding silly at least.
I'm pretty sure neither side was using the word Blitzkrieg anyway. Or even Blitz.
But it's about WWII anyway?
True. But the codebook is supposed to be from the Royal Flying Corps in WWI So how come it has a code for blitz?
Against would be redundant in that context. If the code is intended to be in blocks of five letters then "at" although redundant also works as a filler.
Ludicrous
I don't understand why BBC has wasted screen space on that flight of fantasy?
"HVPKD - Have Panzers Know Directions"
I know that one - "Have spacesuit, will travel".
Seriously, man, if you know directions - give them to us already, or do you need the credit card details first? In this case you will have to wait a bit as they are awfully difficult to find these days, you know, war and stuff...
"FNFJW - Final Note [confirming] Found Jerry's Whereabouts"
Final note? OK, we're listening. Where did you find them?
"DJHFP - Determined Jerry's Headquarters Front Posts"
We thought the last one was final, but yes, great, where are they? Do you mean, if we cut the front posts, the roof will collapse on the Wehrmacht HQ or what?
"CMPNW - Counter Measures [against] Panzers Not Working"
No shit, man! So what do you want *us* to do about that? Or are you sending pigeons to request air support?
"PABLIZ - Panzer Attack - Blitz"
OK, will send three and fourpence, you're going to a dance...
"KLDTS - Know [where] Local Dispatch Station"
Oh, do you? And what do you want in exchange for telling us? Because you must be wanting something, otherwise you would have written the coordinates in the bloody note!
Re: Ludicrous
Its not PABLIZ either, if you look at the pic on the BBC page it's clearly PABUZ . The groups of letters are always groups of 5 not groups of 5 and occasionally 6.
The message was written by a man who wrote his U's in a blocky form. Look at other parts of the message.
Does it mean anything?
My problem with the alleged deciphered/decrypted message is that it doesn't appear to contain much *meaningful* information, beyond a lot of "there are some tanks here", and "there are headquarters here". It's a bit vague. Was this the style of such messages?
Re: Does it mean anything?
"Was this the style of such messages?"
Quite the opposite: If you are conveying important information via a pair of pigeons you've been carrying, you make darned sure that it's useful information!
What the article doesn't really note is the guy only 'decrypted' [cough] less than half the message. You'd assume that if he was correct that the missing parts would be grid references, encrypted via one-time pad... which STILL makes absolutely FA sense: The key thing about crucial communications is that they must be crystal clear. And mixing a smattering of ad hoc acronyms based on outdated 30 year old ones is going to simply confuse the hell out of the recipient, who has never met you or knows of your annoying habit of totally ignoring standard practice, and wonders if you've got your pad open on the right page, or if you've been captured and this is 'Jerry' ineptly passing misinformation.
Panzer in a WW 1 Handbook ???
Correct me if I'm wrong... I thought the term "Panzer" originated in WW2.
Re: Panzer in a WW 1 Handbook ???
"I thought the term "Panzer" originated in WW2."
Ummm... no. It means 'armour', so kinda pre-dates that by several hundred years! The first German vehicle called a 'Panzer' [the Panzer 1] was fielded in 1932. However, the word was also being tossed around by German military thinkers and theorists by that time.
But yeah... it's still a pile of rubbish. And 'Panzer blitz'?! Seriously? As opposed to Blitzkrieg attacks NOT being spearheaded by armour?!? /facepalm.
Re: don't waste your time
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Inside we both know what's been ... goin' on
We know the game and we're ... gonna play it
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Never gonna make you cry
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Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
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Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
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Re: don't waste your time
Rickrolls are still a lot more pleasant than goatse's or meatspin.com
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