Ultra-rare WWII Lorenz cipher machine goes on display at Bletchley Park A rare example of Hitler’s most secret cipher machine, the Lorenz, has been presented for display at the The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park.* Lorenz messages were used to encrypt the messages of the German High Command during World War II. Much more complex than Enigma, the Lorenz cipher could be broken …
Bean bags, colourful meeting rooms, team building sessions at the local cafe drinking expensive coffees and eating quinoa tofu bagels then lots of thought shower,paradigm shift and internal individualism expression sessions to try and work out what the problem is. About 2 years and 20 million pound later they would move onto employing mathematicians.
Mathematicians??
Why'd they want those smelly spoilsports at the party?
Anyway, £20 million would barely pay for the chemicals for the project launch party these days, let alone keep 'em all in whalesong and josticks for two whole years.
In any case this would be a grubbyment project - cue the usual suspects, a vast army of consultants, cost escalations, project resets, a bald minister or three, delays and a project delivered on time and on budget sometime in the 50's.
Which did not work because no one had defined the problem it was supposed to solve in the first place. But was a complete success because lessons had been learned.
"What's this extra wheel at the end for? It looks new. "
"Oh that... That's the GCHQ wheel. Government legislation dictates that we have to include that if we restore our encrypt/decrypt machines to operational condition."
That only applies to publicly visible government IT projects. Somehow, when it comes to seemingly impossible shit like spying on all electronic communications of the entire population for example, they can apparently make it happen quite successfully.
Another reconstructed machine on display at TNMOC, the Tunny, was used to decrypt the Lorenz traffic after it was configured with the wheel settings found by Colossus.
I'm pretty certain that Tunny was the codename for the cipher system, or, by extension, messages encrypted by it. Have you actually seen this machine?
The messages which (as was later found out) were enciphered using the Lorenz machine, were known as "Tunny". (The Lorenz Cipher)
and again:
Bletchley Park decrypts of messages enciphered with the Enigma machines revealed that the Germans called one of their wireless teleprinter transmission systems "Sägefisch" (sawfish), which led British cryptographers to refer to encrypted German teleprinter traffic as "Fish". "Tunny" was the name given to the first non-Morse link, and it was subsequently used for the Lorenz SZ machines and the traffic enciphered by them. (Wikipedia)
The Tunny machine was a logical equivalent of the Lorenz. It was based on Bill Tutte's analysis and an essential part of the decryption process. With the machine set up correctly, the encrypted message could be input and the output would be the plain text German.
The Heath Robinson and Colossus were used to find the start positions for each message.
You can see a working rebuild at TNMOC.
"Always trying to break encryption and read all the secret messages."
Yes, but in this case it was the secret messages of people who really did want to invade us and kill everybody. And the messages weren't made available to every bored or malicious policeman or council official. Because in those days things were run by people who had a clue. Which is why Bletchley Park got so big in the first place.
Totally agree.
Well, as a member of TNMOC, I'd have to agree with you.
There are at least a few lines of my code running in the Radar Displays (PDP-11 Powered) that are on show.
The other highlight (Apart from all the Encryption related stuff is the Cray-1 complete with seating.
I loved seeing the Cray 1, for some reason it gives me goosebumps, as it was always this legendary super computer. They've got one at the Science Museum in London as well, and that had the same affect - it's like bumping into members of a famous 70's band whilst wandering around Sainsburys. Unexpected, you think they'd died years ago, and your first thought is "you're smaller than I expected you to be".
However the best part for me was seeing the WITCH running. That's how I expected an early computer to be - all flashing lights and clicking relays.
"I loved seeing the Cray 1, for some reason it gives me goosebumps, as it was always this legendary super computer."
...the thing that never fails to amaze me is that the Cray has less compute power and less I/O bandwidth than a mobile phone. Which doesn't need Freon cooling.
Now consider that the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost could do 70mph steadily on suitable roads in 1908 and that supercar speeds have increased by barely a factor of 3 in over 100 years, appreciate the significance of Moore's Law.
One typo short of leetness and it's 3 x 379, too.
(What would have happened if a joker german had randomly inserted "Hallo Churchill, du alter Sack, wir wissen dass du dies liest!" into an otherwise standard top secret message about Hitler's preferred napkin colour etc.?)
"What makes you think a German with a sense of humour would ever be allowed near a Lorenz machine"
they weren't. Instead, you get humorless people who used common phrases like 'Heil Hitler' at the beginning and/or end of EVERY! STINKING! MESSAGE! which were then used as 'cribbs' to help decode the remainder of the message.
[if they'd started every message with a RANDOM JOKE, this crypt-cracking exploit might not have been possible]
maybe something like this one:
"Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!"
"What would have happened if a joker german had randomly inserted "
I expect much the same thing as if you'd shout "I don't have a bomb" in the middle of an airport today - except with arguably more lethal consequences and less subsequent tweeting than today. But I think the exercise would give you a pretty good demo, assuming you'd live to tell the tale.
Now the climate seems to have shifted so that those responsible for their very important war work receive full credit, do we think that there is a possibility of a reprint of the original edition of Gordon Welchman's The Hut Six Story, not the bowdlerised one?
PS: can you imagine reverse engineering the logical design of the Lorenz from operator mistakes, cribs and sheer trial and error? amazing.
that the magnificent mechanical engineering that was involved in these encryption / decryption strategies. No whipping out a soldering iron, or tapping away on a keyboard, no it required a skilled machinist on a lathe to execute the next 'test' sample.
Even the 'simple' teleprinter (Teletype) was a mechanical marvel that was reproduced in their millions by skilled assembly workers - none of your mass produced PCBs around at that time.
The Western Teletypes were mass produced and had tolerances that proved it. The German manufactured equivalents were precision machines, as anyone viewing them will know.
"that the magnificent mechanical engineering that was involved in these encryption / decryption strategies"
and yet, those 'precision machines' were generating 'secure' messages that were being cracked, almost 'in real time' [by the end of the war], by skilled crypto experts and primitive computing equipment that was essentially built from spare parts by genius hackers.
obligatory reference to Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority"
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