"The Codebreakers", "Enigma"

Trojan

Just bought:

The Codebreakers - David Kahn
Enigma - Robert Harris

Both 2nd hand, bookshop in Blackrock market, £3 for Enigma, £2 for codebreakers.

Looking forward to the read.

Al.

Karla

Reading Cryptonomicon atm, really very very cool. Highly recommended.

Is that Van Eck phreaking real? The explanation in the book was like, WOW

Are there any other books on this subject that people could recommend?

Thanks

Karla

MiCr0

trojan,
both are excellent books.
there is a new book out atm by an american about the breaking of the enigma code. but this one basically said that they did it all, ie basically made up

MiCr0

ps is it the codebreakers from 1965 or the update from 2 years ago?

[This message has been edited by MiCr0 (edited 06-06-2000).]

anonym00se

The original is so much better than
the new one. Pitty it is a ***** to find,
as I'd love to get a copy

spod

Originally posted by Karla:
Reading Cryptonomicon atm, really very very cool. Highly recommended.

Just bought a copy today at lunch time, haven't actually started reading it yet, looks interesting.

Is that Van Eck phreaking real? The explanation in the book was like, WOW

very much so.
http://www.shmoo.com/tempest/ has a bunch of decent starting points. be paranoid, get a nice flat lcd screen..

Trojan

It's called the "abridged version" (inside, it doesn't mention anything on the cover) and was printed in 1973. It's certainly not the newest version!!

Al.

jmcc

Originally posted by Karla:
Reading Cryptonomicon atm, really very very cool. Highly recommended.

Is that Van Eck phreaking real? The explanation in the book was like, WOW

Van Eck phreaking is very real. If you look at the effect that a computer monitor has on a VHF television reception, you will see how easy it is. Basically you have to have a method of synching the onscreen picture, which often looks compressed or squashed. The older analog method used a radio receiver that picked up the video synch signals on the longwave band and phased them with the video. Most approaches now use digital resynching and DSPs to reconstitute the signal.

Markus Kuhn and Ross Anderson of Cambridge published a paper on it a while ago. There should be some other references on the net. I think that it was also included in Hugo Cornwall's (aka Peter Somer) Hacker Handbook.

The HERF weaponry section in Cryptonomicon is a bit wide of the mark. There is a zone of letality associated with such weapons since they are high energy radio frequency weapons - think big fscking microwave ovens and you have the idea. Normally a HERF would use rare-earth magnets and superconductors to generate the pulse required. There is another method but it is a bit inconvenient in that it requires the case of an M82 and an F14 for delivery. The paper on that is actually freely available on the net.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

Originally posted by MiCr0:
trojan,
both are excellent books.
there is a new book out atm by an american about the breaking of the enigma code. but this one basically said that they did it all, ie basically made up

I think that the new book is the novelisation of the move U-571 which is largely fiction. The Enigma was cracked originally by the Polish crypto group and the British work built on that. The British actually recovered some working Engimas and the weather code book that allowed them to speed up the cracking attempt. Of course they never did crack some of the Enigma keys. However it does illustrate the part that crypto played in WWII. Most of the Allied generals used it heavily.

Mathematically, Enigma was flawed because a character never mapped to itself in the encrypted format. Things like this and the uniformity of German military messages allowed the Allies to develop techniques like traffic analysis that led to the cracking of the codes. Sometimes it is more important to see where messages are coming from that what is in them.

The US had to contend with the Japanese Purple system which I think was similar to Enigma in some respects. The Purple system was cracked by Bill Friedmann and his group. This crack led to the ambushing of the Japanese fleet at Midway.

There is a school of thought that states that the Japanese codes were broken in advance of Pearl Harbour and that the intents of the Japanese were known to both the Americans and the British. A more conspiracy minded line of thought would question why the American carriers were not in port when Pearl was hit.

The abridged version of The Codebreakers left most of the mathematics out. Even so it is one hell of an excellent read however some areas can be a bit tough. When you make and break codes, you tend to have a lot of respect for what these people did.

Regards...jmcc

MiCr0

as it very topical
my special topic for the leaving cert (all those years ago ) was on the breaking of enigma and other crypto-stuff in the 20th century.
very interesting to research