The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#2Does anyone know if all the intercepted German WW2 dispatches have been decrypted? If there's a pile of undecrypted dispatches sitting in a vault somewhere, it could be of great interest to historians if someone applied modern computers and code-breaking techniques to them.
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#3Does anyone know if all the intercepted German WW2 dispatches have been decrypted? If there's a pile of undecrypted dispatches sitting in a vault somewhere, it could be of great interest to historians if someone applied modern computers and code-breaking techniques to them.
We wouldn't need any codebreaking techniques; we know their encryption method. I suspect feeding the papers through OCR would be the most time consuming part. I doubt decrypting would take any longer than SSL.
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#4This reminds me, I'm still reading Cryptonomicon. I find Stephenson's work to be really hard to get into, then hard to put down once you do. Guess I'll keep at it.
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#5I like this story, because it draws the whole complex masquerade operation together around a nice focal point.
Fortitude was a very complicated operation (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude, it even involved faking two entire fictitious armies :D) but executed brilliantly - one of my favourite pieces of war history.
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#6Does anyone know if all the intercepted German WW2 dispatches have been decrypted? If there's a pile of undecrypted dispatches sitting in a vault somewhere, it could be of great interest to historians if someone applied modern computers and code-breaking techniques to them.
We wouldn't need any codebreaking techniques; we know their encryption method. I suspect feeding the papers through OCR would be the most time consuming part. I doubt decrypting would take any longer than SSL.
We know the method, but we also need the key used for any particular message, unless Enigma has been thoroughly broken. IIRC (from The Code Book), at the end of the war Bletchley park couldn't break German naval messages. (They used the same machine as everyone else, but with less predictable messages.)
Am I missing something?
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#7From the headline I thought this was going to be about Operation Mincemeat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat) which is a pretty amazing story.
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
We wouldn't need any codebreaking techniques; we know their encryption method. I suspect feeding the papers through OCR would be the most time consuming part. I doubt decrypting would take any longer than SSL.
We know the method, but we also need the key used for any particular message, unless Enigma has been thoroughly broken. IIRC (from The Code Book ), at the end of the war Bletchley park couldn't break German naval messages. (They used the same machine as everyone else, but with less predictable messages.) Am I missing something?
The search space is small enough that the only "hard" part is telling if the message is properly decoded. They might not have used predictable messages but simply testing for the number of German words / phrases in a given output should work just as well. Assuming the actual messages are not overly cryptic.
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
We wouldn't need any codebreaking techniques; we know their encryption method. I suspect feeding the papers through OCR would be the most time consuming part. I doubt decrypting would take any longer than SSL.
We know the method, but we also need the key used for any particular message, unless Enigma has been thoroughly broken. IIRC (from The Code Book ), at the end of the war Bletchley park couldn't break German naval messages. (They used the same machine as everyone else, but with less predictable messages.) Am I missing something?
Wasn't the whole point of Collossus that it was brute-forcing the messages on the more complex Naval keys until it found a candidate match? That's certainly what I remember from visiting Bletchley Park.
In any case, there are now (finally!) software implementations that are significantly faster than the reproduced hardware Collossus, so even if I'm not fully right brute-forcing messages should be viable.
Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
#10http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat should also be noted. Not only an amazing story/execution, but its successful outcome did have; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat#Impact_on_l...
Well worth reading the book by the same name.