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

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

#71

Post by andix »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #45
Avshalom wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legibility would be my guess. Can't confuse ᴇ for c.

If we're guessing I have ideas: 1) it's just the typeface, 2) the teletype machine has unique letter so the machine it was received in is known (and hence which staff received it), reducing the ability to forge messages. Different machines could have had special letters, or all machines handling secrets had that particular "e"?? 3) the machine broke and the repair shop only had a small-caps "E" handy.

The document on the picture was for sure typed on a typewriter. Teletype machines would either be all caps or all lower case. Also they wouldn't be able to print a multi column header like on top of the document.

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

#72

Post by andix »

jameshart wrote: post #9
vertnerd wrote: post #6

This is a familiar concept from reading about WW2 spy stuff (Between Silk and Cyanide, for example, which I highly recommend). But what REALLY intrigues me is the typeface of the letter with its upper-case 'E' used in place of 'e'. What's up with that?

That is peculiar. Brief internet search turned up a Reddit post where someone had a sample of typed text with the same odd typography: https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/s/f2CIY0TCm3 The suggestion that it may have been a striker from a bilingual - cyrillic typewriter that was mixed in is an interesting possibility; someone transcribing diplomatic telegrams in WWII may indeed have need of access to Cyrillic typewri…

Interesting idea, but both the Cyrillic and Greek capital E would be a similar size to the Latin capital E. And in both alphabets the lower case e doesn't look like a smaller capital E. It's е/ε.

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

#73

Post by aaron695 »

jameshart wrote: post #9
vertnerd wrote: post #6

This is a familiar concept from reading about WW2 spy stuff (Between Silk and Cyanide, for example, which I highly recommend). But what REALLY intrigues me is the typeface of the letter with its upper-case 'E' used in place of 'e'. What's up with that?

That is peculiar. Brief internet search turned up a Reddit post where someone had a sample of typed text with the same odd typography: https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/s/f2CIY0TCm3 The suggestion that it may have been a striker from a bilingual - cyrillic typewriter that was mixed in is an interesting possibility; someone transcribing diplomatic telegrams in WWII may indeed have need of access to Cyrillic typewri…

[dead]

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

#75

Post by robotresearcher »

andoma wrote: post #57
maxbond wrote: 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…

I visited Bletchley Park museum this summer when in London. Can recommend and it's also really easy to get there; just a 50 minute train ride from London Euston station, and 5 minute walk to the museum. Entire family enjoyed the museum (have two teenage kids). There is also the "National Museum of Computing" located next to it which contains the Bombe, Collosus and related equipment. As I understand it most (or all?)…

A personal Bletchley Park anecdote: my grandfather, an electrical engineer, staffed a radio listening station during the war, and every evening a motorcycle dispatch rider would take the day’s intercepts away to a secret location. It was more than 20 years before my grandfather figured out they went to Bletchley.

In the 1980s the Bletchley museum project put out a call for wartime electrical components so they could build their Colossus replica. My grandfather in the 1950s had made a chain of Christmas tree lights from govt issue tiny light lightbulbs he pinched from work. He painstakingly removed the nail polish he had painted them with 30 years earlier, and sent them to Bletchley. They used his family Christmas lightbulbs in the replica that is still there today.

I had the privilege of touring the museum with him in the 1990s. Also on that day I heard my grandmother’s stories of her time in the British Army during the war. That day was incredibly interesting and moving, and is an important memory for me.

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

#76

Post by ars »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #62

How come this isnt a problem with modern cryptography? What did we invent?

You add a random number to the encryption key, and also send that random number (seed) as part of the message.

Boiled down to the very essence modern cryptography is: Using a secret seed plus a public seed, generate a long random number (of the same length as the message), then XOR that number with the message.

The hard part is generating that random number in such a way that you can not reverse the process and reclaim the secret seed.

Lookup "initialization vector" for more.

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

#77

Post by Animats »

maxbond wrote: 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…

As I point out now and then, Colossus was not a computer. It was a key-tester, like a Bitcoin miner. Here's the block diagram of Colossus.[1]

Before there were general-purpose stored program digital computers, there were many special-purpose computing devices. They checked some, but not all, of those boxes.

- IBM had electronic arithmetic in test before WWII, but that went on hold during the war. Mechanical arithmetic worked fine, although slowly, and by 1939, Columbia University and IBM had something that looked vaguely like a programmable computer, built from IBM tabulator parts.

- The G.P.O. (the UK's post office and telephony provider) had been fooling around with electronic switching since 1934. That's where Tommy Flowers, who designed the electronics of Colossus, came from.[2] He had a tough life. After the war, he wanted to get into computers, but couldn't get funding because he couldn't talk about what he'd done for security reasons.

- Memory was the big problem. Colossus just had some registers, built from tubes. And plugboards, the ROM technology of the 1930s and 1940s. Useful memory devices were all post-war. Needed storage to get to stored program computers.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Logical-architecture-of-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers

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

#78

Post by myself248 »

xtiansimon wrote: post #8

Interesting. I liked the explanations in the accepted answer. This rule especially,“Never repeat in the clear the identical text of a message once sent in cryptographic form, or repeat in cryptographic form the text of a message once sent in the clear.” As a child I learned about codes from a library book. Fascinated with one-time pads, I convinced a friend to try a correspondence. We exchanged a few messages, and th…

Do you remember the book? I remember loving Alvin's Secret Code, which was on the bookshelf in my fourth-grade classroom where I sat in the back to be near the bookshelf...

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

#79

Post by ziofill »

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.
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