Tru that.
Dunno if it’s been covered here. I recently saw the movie “The Imitation Game,” and apparently they signed off with “Heil, Hitler”. At least that’s what Benedict Cumberbatch says, “We cracked their code because of two words.”
Alan Turing was not treated too kindly in that movie. In other movies he’s giving other probable apocryphal quotes, so whether he was so insufferable is something of an enigma (see what I did there?)
He was a highly intelligent gay man at a time when homosexual acts between men were illegal and homosexuals despised (and feared).
He clearly had little time for those he perceived as fools and made no secret of it, which, in spite of his invaluable contribution to the war effort, must have made him many enemies among the politically powerful.
It was definitely discussed rather extensively in the thread.
It’s not entirely untrue but certainly dramatized for effect. It was almost certainly a phrase found in several messages but it was not a generally used signoff nor used universally in every encrypted message.
FWIW, I doubt the line was an actual quote but don’t know for sure. The “two words” thing is certainly not literally true, no matter if Turing actually uttered those words or not. I suspect not as most mathematicians value accuracy, perhaps pedantically so.
Similarly, in WW2, British troops had drummed into them principles like “Name, rank and number only”, because it had become clear that all too many of those taken POW at the Somme and elsewhere let out too much information. And if you’ve read up the security arrangements of WW2 undercover agents and escape line organisers, you’d be horrified at the way, early in WW1, British soldiers helped back home by Edith Cavell wrote to her - in German-occupied Brussels - explicitly to thank her for doing so
Something similar did actually occur in SOE, according to Leo Marks’s Silk & Cyanide. Suspecting that their radio operators in the Netherlands had been turned by the Germans, and knowing German operators’ semi-automatic habits, he sent an innocuous message signed off with “HH”. When the reply came back with the same sign-off, he thought that proof, but his superiors disagreed and sent yet more agents straight into the enemy’s hands.
I was thinking they needed a plausible way to sum up all the efforts by simplifying it to two words.
In any case, in that movie, it leads to the quandary about how immediately that data could be used if planes and ships suddenly alter their course to sink U-boats. This leads to the drama of not interfering in particular attacks till they can spread the word about something plausible, like special aircraft or weather balloons, to explain how they’d know where U-boats were. “We definitely did not crack the Enigma code,” kind of spycraft, and it was good enough that the Germans kept using it.
On the USA side, there were the Indian Code Talkers, who not only could use their indigenous language but also would refer to U-boats as “iron fish” and likely still kept changing that up.
I’ve seen it. But it is heavily dramatized. It was important to avoid letting Germany knew how broken it was but the movie (naturally and very understandably) oversimplifies many of the concepts for the benefit of a lay audience.
In reality, it took a huge effort at the time to break each day’s code, and how long it took could not be made consistent. That is, sometimes they could have it done by the morning, other times by the late evening, and still other times not broken at all, especially early on.
As for the Navajo code talkers, that’s also been discussed extensively in the thread.
There were a number of cases during World War II where the Allies fooled the Axis by making them think that they would attack at some point on the European coasts different from where they actually attacked. Look up the operations Fortitude South, Fortitude North, Mincemeat, Bodyguard, and Glimmer, and Taxable. These sorts of operations were as important to the victories of the Allies as the codes.
Yes, I’ve read it (now, so sorry for being redundant), and the code talkers and “Heil Hitler” thing comprised most of the posts.
After all these years, there should be a book documenting all the messages deciphered, and perhaps Germany has offered up others. As mentioned (extensively) the Indian Code Talkers would change up their own wording to look like gibberish except to those who knew this was a coded message. “All I see is talk about clouds” - yet cirrus and cumulus (or whatever the Indigenous people used to describe clouds) would be meaningful.
So were the Germans using not only coherent, but also one of the formal versions of their language? Meanwhile the Code Talkers would be having a pleasant conversation (seemingly) the next week about Rivers?
Certainly at least some messages do not seem to be talking about clouds; e.g.,
FHPQX AN X PANZ X GRUPPE X VIER X SIEGFRIED SIEGFRIED TONI X DIV X STEHT
SEIT X EINS ZWO X SIEBEN X EINS EINS NULL NULL X UHR MIT ANFAENGEN AM
UNTERKUNFTSRAUM X KANN NIQT EINFLIESZEN X DA X DRITTE X INF X DIV X UND X
AQTE X PANZ X DIV X BLOQIEREN UND RAUM BELEGT HALTE X DIV X KDR X
That’s the difference between encoding and encrypting.
A code will just use regular words and phrases. But they will mean something else.
An encryption does that with the individual letters.
Each has its uses but generally, the purpose of both is the same - clear communication to and from intended recipients and indecipherable to anybody else. If your encryption is good, adding an extra layer of obfuscation by also encoding messages just adds time and effort and potentially additional errors in deciphering them.
There are strengths and potential weaknesses to both.
Codes are generally not a good idea when sending thousands of messages daily between thousands of potential units spread across an entire continent or ocean. We never had more than a few hundred Navajo code talkers at any time, and the capture of any individual one of them was a massive security issue. But if you only need secure communication between a small number of people for a limited amount of time, it’s very effective.
Encryption, like Enigma, addresses the scaling issue and the Germans had tens of thousands of machines deployed by the end of the war. The issue they had was their algorithm was not secure (the Americans and the British also primarily used encryption, not code talkers, but a more secure method) and also their users did not follow good practices.
The German Navy, at least, had put a much more secure versions of Enigma into use by 1942 or 1943 that in many cases wasn’t broken even by the end of the war. But clearly too late to ultimately matter. Advances in computing would have rendered it all moot within a few years in any event.
More precisely, it’s possible for an encryption system to work on letters or bytes or bits.
Though I saw a documentary of some sort where a high school student defeated this level of security to improve a course grade. Apparently inspiring the fellow to then unwittingly hack into a NORAD stategy simulator, resulting in a level of chaos where even internal combustion igniter urination was offered as a solution.
Stay diligent in password security or nature will start again, probably with the bees is all I’m saying.
I would say that encryption works on the level of symbols, while encoding works on the level of meanings.
Just like cheating at gambling, you need to be a little luckier than chance, but not anazingly consistently crazy-lucky.
Unlucky on your small bets, then very lucky on the big one.
Anyways, the Royal Navy would arrange for a recon flight to go over the area and be seen by the target. The Germans would think that that was how they were spotted.
It helped that the person who wrote the simulator software used the name of his dead son as the password instead of one more secure, like Joshua1.