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

31–40 of 53 posts

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#31

Post by logjam »

markkat wrote: post #19

This is very tangential, but I just happened to finish the "Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman last night. If any HN military history buffs have not read it yet, do pick it up. Although about the opening of WWI, it provides some great insight into both World Wars.

Amazing book, highly detailed. Watching the madness of supposedly rational men bowing to militarism and nationalism, whipped along by supposedly inviolate plans and timetables, creating the conditions for not one but two world wars...it's all the stuff of nightmares.

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#32

Post by paulgerhardt »

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.

Perhaps you'll like the Bodyguard of Lies (http://www.amazon.com/Bodyguard-Lies-Extraordinary-Story-Beh...). It largely focuses on the utilitarian sacrifices that were forcibly made in order to maintain the intelligence advantage.

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#33

Post by [deleted] »

danshapiro wrote: post #28

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.

[deleted]

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#34

Post by eftpotrm »

mckoss wrote: post #25
eftpotrm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Tunny was the British codename for data from the Lorenz machine, which is what Collossus was working on. The original Enigma machines were attacked by Bombe machines developed by Polish codebreakers pre-war.

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#35

Post by markkat »

logjam wrote: post #31
markkat wrote: post #19

This is very tangential, but I just happened to finish the "Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman last night. If any HN military history buffs have not read it yet, do pick it up. Although about the opening of WWI, it provides some great insight into both World Wars.

Amazing book, highly detailed. Watching the madness of supposedly rational men bowing to militarism and nationalism, whipped along by supposedly inviolate plans and timetables, creating the conditions for not one but two world wars...it's all the stuff of nightmares.

Agreed. And yet, you walk away better understanding how those nightmares can become reality. By chance, I picked up Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" from a sidewalk seller, and was struck by her ability to address so many parts of a whole. After finding that she won the Pulitzer for "The Guns of August", I had to read it.

I've heard that JFK was a big fan of "The Guns of August", and made it required reading in his cabinet.

As an aside, Tuchman is now recognized for the following reflection, which is often paraphrased as Tuchman's Law: "Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena."

Oh, BTW: On the topic of encryption, I can't believe the Russians were sending unencrypted orders in WWI over wireless!

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#37

Post by redrobot5050 »

philh wrote: post #6
redthrowaway wrote: post #3

Earlier 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?

Yes, you are. Fortunately, Wiki backed my understanding of the situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_Machine#Military_Enigma

In short, the Navy, specifically U boats, used a non-standard, stronger crypto (in this, more rotors) Enigma machine, called M4. They formed their own Enigma network called "Triton" which the allies called "Shark".

Due to their hardening, and less message sent for traffic analysis, these machines were "safer" against cryptanalysis.

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#38

Post by protomyth »

oiuytghyujki wrote: post #21
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 i…

  All crypto systems fail when faced with human operators!
Also doesn't help if you don't destroy your crypto books / equipment when boarded: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-505

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#39

Post by jordanb »

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.…

While we're telling war stories. ;) Nonces played a role in a major American blunder too.

During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Admiral Halsey moved his massive Third fleet out of position to chase a Japanese ruse. The Japanese then moved their Central Force through the gap and attacked the much smaller and ill-prepared Seventh Fleet.

The commander of the Seventh Fleet sent several desperate messages asking for Halsey's help, causing Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor to send a message to Halsey asking, simply "WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR?" (Task Force 34 was the Third Fleet's detachment of battleships).

His clerk changed the message to WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR? And then, while forming the message, added the beginning nonce "TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG" and the trailing nonce "RR THE WORLD WONDERS". The "GG" and "RR" were indicators of the end and beginning of the nonces.

Halsey's clerk removed the first nonce, but left the last one "THE WORLD WONDERS" as part of the message, apparently missing the "RR". So when Halsey got the message, it read "WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR THE WORLD WONDERS".

Halsey interpreted the message as sarcastic criticism of his decisions by a commanding officer over official channels, and flew into a rage. He then decided to delay the Third Fleet's assistance of the Seventh Fleet, ostensibly to refuel his destroyers.

Had he sent the battleships immediately, they likely would have crossed the Central Force's T and crushed them. It would have been one of the greatest (and last) battleship duels in history.

Of course the blunder didn't affect the outcome of the war, or even the battle in a strategic since. The Seventh Fleet was able to turn the Central Force back, mostly through self-sacrificial courage on the part of the destroyer crews.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_world_wonders

Re: The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

#40

Post by stcredzero »

jordanb wrote: post #39
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.…

While we're telling war stories. ;) Nonces played a role in a major American blunder too. During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Admiral Halsey moved his massive Third fleet out of position to chase a Japanese ruse. The Japanese then moved their Central Force through the gap and attacked the much smaller and ill-prepared Seventh Fleet. The commander of the Seventh Fleet sent several desperate messages asking for Halsey's h…

the Third Fleet was able to turn the Central Fleet back on their own mostly through self-sacrificial courage on the part of the destroyers.

I know of that action from documentaries. Basically, the destroyers engaged heavier ship classes which they theoretically had no hope against. In some cases, "charged" is actually more apt than "engaged."

Post reply on HN