Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 53 posts

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#21

Post by oiuytghyujki »

stcredzero wrote: post #20

I from a crypto history book I read in high school: in WWI, German intercepts of Russian transmissions have the Russians illusions of German tactical genius. Somehow, Germans would often be in position to confound the Russians. The reason for this: Russian code clerks were badly trained. Sometimes there would be a couple of attempts to send a message followed by a plain-text transmission by the frustrated code clerk.…

All crypto systems fail when faced with human operators!

There was one story of an Afrika corp operator who sent HIT - LER as the 2 'secret' triplets every day for the entire North Africa campaign. Then disastrously he was captured!

It's an interesting question as to whether at least the best (4-wheel naval) system could be cracked without operator error or deliberate plain text seeding.

The only flaw of the enigma is that a letter cannot be encrypted to itself - I have heard different accounts of if this was enough to always make it crackable.

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#22

Post by oiuytghyujki »

ErrantX wrote: post #5

I 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.

Amateurs! One modern leader of an impoverished 3rd world country managed to fake an entire nuclear, biological, chemical warfare capability and the ICBMs necessary to attack Britain within 45mins.

And he did it so successfully we were forced to invade.

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#23

Post by endtime »

oiuytghyujki wrote: post #22
ErrantX wrote: post #5

I 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.

Amateurs! One modern leader of an impoverished 3rd world country managed to fake an entire nuclear, biological, chemical warfare capability and the ICBMs necessary to attack Britain within 45mins. And he did it so successfully we were forced to invade.

>so successfully we were forced to invade.

I'd argue that that constitutes a failure mode...

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#25

Post by mckoss »

eftpotrm wrote: post #9
philh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From my understanding, Collossus was not used against Enigma, but rather, Tuny (an teletype based 5 bit XOR stream cipher).

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#26

Post by [deleted] »

stcredzero wrote: post #20

I from a crypto history book I read in high school: in WWI, German intercepts of Russian transmissions have the Russians illusions of German tactical genius. Somehow, Germans would often be in position to confound the Russians. The reason for this: Russian code clerks were badly trained. Sometimes there would be a couple of attempts to send a message followed by a plain-text transmission by the frustrated code clerk.…

[deleted]

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#28

Post by danshapiro »

Did anyone else notice that the BBC tarted up their headline to the point that it's actually false? The piece of paper was written by the Germans. It didn't "fool" them. It was proof that the Germans had been fooled, but I guess that's not quite as good for linkbait.

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#29

Post by sp332 »

oiuytghyujki wrote: post #22
ErrantX wrote: post #5

I 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.

Amateurs! One modern leader of an impoverished 3rd world country managed to fake an entire nuclear, biological, chemical warfare capability and the ICBMs necessary to attack Britain within 45mins. And he did it so successfully we were forced to invade.

After doing it once, he had a lot of credibility when he said "Hey, remember the centrifuges the Germans helped us build in the 80's? and the chemical weapons we bought from Germany, refined with French equipment, and used to genocide the Kurds? Yeah, we're doing that stuff again."

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Al-Anfal_Camp...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Iraq_and_weap...

Post reply on HN