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“This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone”

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131–140 of 144 posts

Re: “This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone”

#131
post #79

I forget who told me this story, but at some point the British tried a crazy known-plaintext attack by planting handwritten notes in dead German soldiers’ pockets that contained an “important message” to be sent, and then in the following days they would attempt to decrypt enigma communications against the known plaintext.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat

The book by Ben Macintyre, "Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory", is very good.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7632329-operation-mincem...

Re: “This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone”

#132
post #24

ETA: Note that I appear to have been mistaken about the connection to ENIAC. Note that it is equally dangerous to send paraphrased messages using the same key (which is called sending messages "in depth"). This was used to crack the Lorenz ("Tunny") cipher. Interestingly Bletchley Park hadn't gotten their hands on a Lorenz machine, they cracked it based on speculation. And it lead to the development of the first tube…

This is the first I’ve heard of Colossus influencing the ENIAC. I was under the impression that Colossus was so secret that ENIAC was designed independently and (falsely) touted as the first tube computer prior to Colossus’ existence being declassified. I’m not sure if I’m misremembering that though.

Colossus did not influence ENIAC.

However, there is a connection between British electronics and ENIAC, which is the same, but happened in parallel, with the connection between earlier British electronics and Colossus.

During the decade before WWII, several fundamental circuits of digital electronics had been invented in UK, e.g. several kinds of electronic counters and the Schmitt trigger.

Those circuits have been invented mainly for use in experiments of nuclear physics and elementary particle physics, e.g. for counting events from radiation detectors, for which the existing mechanical counters and accumulators were too slow. The first digital electronic circuit, the Eccles-Jordan trigger, had also been invented by British physicists, but another decade earlier, at the end of WWI.

The British digital electronic circuits were a source of inspiration for the circuits used in the first (special-purpose) digital electronic computer, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, which was built at Iowa State University immediately before WWII (the published British research papers were explicitly quoted in the ABC design documents).

In turn, the digital electronic circuits used in the Atanasoff-Berry Computer were a source of inspiration for those used in ENIAC, because a member of the Mauchly-Eckert team had visited the designers of ABC, inquiring about its components, even if later they did not credit any source of inspiration for the ENIAC design (the Mauchly-Eckert team founded a startup for making electronic computers, so they were wary of providing any information that would make their work appear as less original and not patentable and they were also extremely annoyed by the publication of the von Neumann report, which explained for everyone how to make an electronic computer, so it created very soon a great number of competitors for the company of Mauchly and Eckert).

Re: “This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone”

#133
post #79

I forget who told me this story, but at some point the British tried a crazy known-plaintext attack by planting handwritten notes in dead German soldiers’ pockets that contained an “important message” to be sent, and then in the following days they would attempt to decrypt enigma communications against the known plaintext.

Few years ago I read 'Between Silk and Cyanide': Britain's Wartime Spies and Saboteurs', the autobiography of Leo Marks who worked in the British Special Operations Executive. He designed cryptography for agents behind enemy lines (thus the title: you could print one time pads on silk, and silk was harder to discover during pat-downs than paper). Lots of interesting stories in there, including when he suspected that…

[deleted]

Re: “This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone”

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat

> Part of the wider Operation Barclay, Mincemeat was based on the 1939 Trout memo, written by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the director of the Naval Intelligence Division, and his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming Wonder if we'll ever see it on a bond movie.

Not a Bond one, but there's already a movie about it: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1879016/

Re: “This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone”

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardening_(cryptanalysis)

That's not what gp was talking about.

Why did you say this to me, and not also to the other person who came after me? The fact that the other person is also upvoted kind of puts your argument to rest. Being contrary isn’t a great argumentative style on HN. You have no way of knowing what GP meant.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088082

Re: “This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone”

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what gp was talking about.

Why did you say this to me, and not also to the other person who came after me? The fact that the other person is also upvoted kind of puts your argument to rest. Being contrary isn’t a great argumentative style on HN. You have no way of knowing what GP meant. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088082

because the other person hadn't said their piece by the time I said this, and because I stand by the fact that it's simply wrong to conflate leaving a body from england to deceive an enemy about the indented invasion location of an operation (regular deception, no cryptographic purpose). I think it's different, cryptographically speaking, to trying to provoke the enemy to use a known plaintext to try and help breaking their code, which I find a very interesting concept. For what its worth, I also downvoted the other comment yesterday, and the third comment today. I'm frankly astonished so many people are conflating the imo clearly different ideas.

I appreciate your edit that completely replaced the topic of your post; it is now much more interesting. But unfortunately, I could not edit my comment by the time I saw you had changed it

Re: “This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone”

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you say this to me, and not also to the other person who came after me? The fact that the other person is also upvoted kind of puts your argument to rest. Being contrary isn’t a great argumentative style on HN. You have no way of knowing what GP meant. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088082

because the other person hadn't said their piece by the time I said this, and because I stand by the fact that it's simply wrong to conflate leaving a body from england to deceive an enemy about the indented invasion location of an operation (regular deception, no cryptographic purpose). I think it's different, cryptographically speaking, to trying to provoke the enemy to use a known plaintext to try and help breakin…

> For what its worth, I also downvoted the other comment yesterday

Seems like you just don’t like me. Sounds like motivated reasoning to me. But I thought you meant (my) other comment, not theirs. I think it’s possibly an issue with tone being hard to read in text. In any case, I try to add a correction instead of simply calling out mistakes, but you were right to say whatever you thought. I don’t mean to silence you, but your words had a chilling effect on my speech, so maybe give some reasoning and a correct answer next time instead of just calling someone wrong. Anyone can do that, and they too often do.

At least now I know it’s due to that argument being kind of a weak one. I thought they were concerned with the notes especially, which is why I included that reference because it specifically referred to notes. I think there may be other WW2 examples, but I couldn’t lay hand to them at the time.

> I appreciate your edit; it is now much more interesting.

I appreciate you saying that. I don’t mean to assume you don’t like me, but it seemed that way at the time you said it. Apologies for assuming, and for any offense caused.

Edit: For what it’s worth I didn’t downvote you either time, and in fact I upvoted the comment this one is in reply to.

Re: “This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone”

#138
post #118
post #79

I forget who told me this story, but at some point the British tried a crazy known-plaintext attack by planting handwritten notes in dead German soldiers’ pockets that contained an “important message” to be sent, and then in the following days they would attempt to decrypt enigma communications against the known plaintext.

You can listen to the podcast, if you want. It's called operation Mincemeat https://pca.st/podcast/0d412ec0-af39-0139-c19f-0acc26574db2

that's... not what gp was talking about. Why are so many people jumping in with this mistake?

Operation mincemeat wasn't a german officer, it wasn't anything about using a known plaintext to compare to coded messages, it wasn't pretending to be german documents, and it wasn't to help with cryptanalysis. About the only similarity is a dead body

Re: “This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone”

#139
I was trained with regards to realtime control systems to put salt in the messages to reduce repetition. Many systems just repeat a status or number from which you could more easily get the keys. Never knew if it was a real concern or not. Interesting to see from the post and comments how old a concept this is. With today’s encryption is this still a concern?

Re: “This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone”

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because the other person hadn't said their piece by the time I said this, and because I stand by the fact that it's simply wrong to conflate leaving a body from england to deceive an enemy about the indented invasion location of an operation (regular deception, no cryptographic purpose). I think it's different, cryptographically speaking, to trying to provoke the enemy to use a known plaintext to try and help breakin…

> For what its worth, I also downvoted the other comment yesterday Seems like you just don’t like me. Sounds like motivated reasoning to me. But I thought you meant (my) other comment, not theirs. I think it’s possibly an issue with tone being hard to read in text. In any case, I try to add a correction instead of simply calling out mistakes, but you were right to say whatever you thought. I don’t mean to silence you…

I can’t edit this anymore, but you are correct.

> (regular deception, no cryptographic purpose)

That is a very good distinction with a difference, and you were right to elucidate this; I only wish you had done it in your original reply to me. In any case, my stream of consciousness post above was in haste, and I think we were both editing at the time. I will try to post better. I wonder if folks are copy posting me? I honestly can’t say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copypasta

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/copypasta

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