Quotes About Codebreaking

Yardley's The American Black Chamber

Plaintext a might be represented in a long message by all 26 letters. Conversely, any given ciphertext letter might stand for any one of 26 plaintext letters.

The more a cipher deviates from the simple form in which one ciphertext letter invariably replaces the same plaintext letter, the harder it is to break.

Gorgo, who may be considered the first woman cryptanalyst

But the FBI didn't intercept the messages. It didn't monitor the Nazi circuits. It didn't break the codes. It didn't solve any Enigma machines. The coast guard did this stuff—the little codebreaking team that Elizebeth created from nothing.

This is the essence of codebreaking, finding patterns, and because it's such a basic human function, codebreakers have always emerged from unexpected places. They pop up from strange corners. Codebreakers tend to be oddballs, outsiders. The most important trait is not pure math skill but a deeper ability to pay attention.

For the first eight months of the war, as incredible as it sounds, William and Elizebeth, and their team at Riverbank, did all of the codebreaking for every part of the U.S.

Until 1930, almost all codebreaking for the U.S. government's planetary war against smuggling was handled by these two tired and perpetually overworked women, Elizebeth and her clerk

MAGIC secret. It was a prime example of the brutal choices that codebreakers must live with. Do you take risks to keep a secret that may save hundreds of thousands of future lives, or do you expose the secret to save a small number of lives right now? William once referred to this broad dilemma as "cryptologic schizophrenia," adding, "What to do? Thus far, no real psychiatric or psychoanalytic cure has been found for the illness.

The common saying about cryptologists, as William phrased it, was that "it is not necessary" to be insane, "but it helps.

She had conquered at least forty-eight different clandestine radio circuits and three Enigma machines to get these plaintexts. The pages found their way to the navy and to the army. To FBI headquarters in Washington and bureaus around the world. To Britain. There was no mistaking their origin. Each sheet said "CG Decryption" at the bottom, in black ink. These pieces of paper saved lives. They almost certainly stopped coups.

Turing machine.

Alan Turing installed something known as a bombe machine, an electro-mechanical device which made hundreds

Somebody will be able to overcome any encryption technique you use!

I start 'The Code Book' with the story of Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington Plot, which was foiled when Mary's enciphered messages fell into the hands of Elizabeth I's codebreakers.

Tunny should still have been unbreakable, but like Enigma it was made vulnerable by the carelessness of its operators and the bureaucratic nature of their system.

Rejewski had no idea of the day key, and he had no idea which message keys were being chosen, but he did know that they resulted in this table of relationships. Had

Previous experience, however, tells us that every so-called unbreakable cipher has, sooner or later, succumbed to cryptanalysis

the Vigenère cipher belongs to a class known as polyalphabetic, because it employs several cipher alphabets per message. The polyalphabetic nature of the Vigenère cipher is what gives it its strength, but it also makes it much more complicated to use. The additional effort required in order to implement the Vigenère cipher discouraged many people from employing it.

Al-Kindi's technique, known as frequency analysis, shows that it is unnecessary to check each of the billions of potential keys. Instead, it is possible to reveal the contents of a scrambled message simply by analysing the frequency of the characters in the ciphertext.

had the cipher machines been used properly—without repeated message keys, without cillies, without restrictions on plugboard settings and scrambler arrangements, and without stereotypical messages which resulted in cribs—it is quite possible that they might never have been broken at all.

A large amount of identically encrypted material provides a cryptanalyst with a correspondingly larger chance of identifying the key.

the Germans therefore took the clever step of using the day key settings to transmit a new message key for each message.

The fate of the Polish nation had depended on Rejewski, and he did not disappoint his country. Rejewski's attack on Enigma is one of the truly great accomplishments of cryptanalysis.