Alan could have been born in India: his father Julius worked in the Indian Civil Service, and the family were just living in India when Ethel Sarah became pregnant. But the couple decided that it was better for the child to be born in London. Alan did just that.

From birth, Alan was, as they say, a strange child and at the same time a genius. According to some versions, he learned to read in just three weeks, and at the age of seven, Alan wanted to collect honey from wild bees during a picnic. To do this, he calculated the flight paths of insects among the heather and thus found the hive.

At the age of six, Alan Turing went to school, and at 13 he became a student at the famous private school Sherborne. It is curious that in Sherborne the humanities were much more valued, but Alan’s passion for mathematics was not encouraged. The school principal wrote to parents:

“I hope he won’t try to sit on two chairs at once. If he intends to remain in a private school, then he must strive to obtain an “education.” If he is going to be exclusively a “scientific specialist,” then a private school is a waste of time for him.”

There, in Sherborne, Alan met someone who became his close friend and, perhaps, his first love, Christopher Marcom. Unfortunately, the young man died from complications from bovine tuberculosis, leaving Alan in despair. It was this death that forced Turing to abandon his religious views and made him an atheist.

“I am sure that I will never meet again a companion so gifted and at the same time so charming,” Alan wrote to Marcom’s mother. “I shared with him my interest in astronomy (which he introduced me to), and he did the same for me... I know that I have to put as much energy, if not as much interest, into my work as I would have if I had he’s alive, that’s what he would like.”

Correspondence with his friend's mother continued for many years after Morcom's death, and all the letters were filled with tender memories of Christopher.

Alan entered King's College Cambridge, where his talents were already taken seriously. There he came up with the idea of ​​a universal machine - it was still an abstract idea, from which the concept of a computer was later born. Alan studied mathematics and cryptography.

Bletchley Park, The Dilly Girls and The Turing Bomb

Bletchley Park was also called “Station X” or simply “BP” - it was a large mansion in the center of England, which during the Second World War was used for the needs of the main cryptographic department of Britain. Asa Briggs, a wartime historian and codebreaker, said: “Exceptional talent was needed at Bletchley, genius was needed. Turing was that genius."

Like any genius, he was strange. Colleagues called him by the short nickname Prof.

Historian Ronald Levin writes that Jack Goode, a cryptanalyst who worked with Turing, spoke of Alan as follows:

“In the first week of June every year he would have a bad attack of hay fever and would ride his bike to work wearing a gas mask to protect himself from the pollen. His bicycle was broken; the chain was falling off at regular intervals. Instead of fixing it, he counted the number of pedal revolutions through which the chain came off, got off the bike and manually adjusted it. Another time, he chained his mug to the radiator pipes to prevent it from being stolen.”

Because British men were at war, most of Bletchley's workers were women. Cryptographers worked long hours decoding intercepted messages.

“In 1939, the job of a codebreaker, although it required skill, was boring and monotonous,” says Andrew Hodges in The Universe of Alan Turing. “However, encryption was an integral attribute of radio communications. The latter was used in war in the air, at sea and on land, and a radio message for one became available to everyone, so the messages had to be rendered unrecognizable. They weren’t just made “secret,” like those of spies or smugglers, but the entire communication system was classified. This meant errors, limitations, and hours of work on each message. However, there was no choice."

One of the most famous teams was a group of women called the Dilly Girls. They worked under the direction of cryptanalyst Dilvin Knox. It was these women who deciphered the famous Enigma code, and Turing worked on the creation of a cryptanalytic machine. One of the "Dilly girls" was Joan Clarke.

Joan Clark

Turing became incredibly close to Joan, a rather reserved girl. She worked on deciphering maritime codes in real time, one of the most stressful jobs at Bletchley.

“We spent time together,” she recalled in a 1992 interview with BBC Horizon. “We went to the movies, but it was a big surprise for me when he said: “Will you agree to marry me?” I was surprised, but I didn’t doubt it for a second, I answered “yes,” and he knelt in front of my chair and kissed me even though we had no physical contact. The next day we went for a walk after lunch. And then he said that he had homosexual tendencies. Naturally, this worried me a little - I knew for sure that this would be forever.”

Turing broke off the engagement a few months later, but despite this they remained close friends.

Graham Moore, screenwriter of The Imitation Game, believes it was their strangeness that brought Alan and Joan together: “They were both outcasts and that was something they had in common, they saw things differently.”

Gross obscenity

In December 1951, 39-year-old Turing met Arnold Murray. He was 19. An unemployed handsome young man, thin, with big blue eyes and blond hair. Alan invited Arnold to a restaurant. After some time they saw each other again and spent the night together.

Although Alan tried to offer Arnold money, he said he didn't want to be treated like a prostitute. He "borrowed" money from Turing several times, and some time later someone robbed Alan's house.

Arnold confessed to his lover that his friend did it. Alan reported the robbery to the police, but he was forced to admit his homosexuality.

Alan was confident that parliament would soon legalize homosexual relations.

Arnold and Alan appeared in court. They were charged with “gross indecency” and both were found guilty. Arnold received parole, and Alan was given a choice: prison time or treatment for homosexuality with hormones.

Turing wrote to his friend Philip Hall: “I am given a suspended sentence for a year and am required to undergo treatment for the same period. The drugs are supposed to reduce sexual desire while it lasts... Psychiatrists seem to have decided that there is no use in getting involved with psychotherapy.”

And he also said: “Without a doubt, another person will come out of all this, but I don’t know who exactly.”

Poisoned Apple

On June 8, 1954, Turing's housekeeper found him dead in his room. Next to him lay a bitten apple, which most likely became the cause of death. Alan was very fond of Disney's Snow White. According to biographers Hodges and David Leavitt, he took "particularly acute pleasure in the scene where the Evil Queen plunges her apple into the poisonous drink."

Most likely, Alan poisoned the apple with cyanide and ate it.

In August 2009, British computer programmer John Graham-Cumming wrote a petition calling on the British government to apologize for persecuting Turing for his homosexuality. It collected more than 30,000 signatures, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a statement of apology:

“Thousands of people have demanded justice for Alan Turing and demanded that he be treated appallingly. Turing was treated according to the law of that time, and we cannot turn back time, what they did to him was, of course, unfair. I and all of us deeply regret what happened to him. On behalf of the British Government and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work, I say: Forgive us, you deserve better.

Photo: Getty Images, REX

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Introduction

In the modern world, encoding (protecting) information is of no small importance for people, for protecting the property of an individual and the state. Protection of information is protection of the integrity of the country. In the age of informatization, a secure country is one that can preserve its information resources.

Until recently, all research in this area was only closed, but in the last few years, more and more publications in the open press have begun to appear here and abroad. Part of the reason for the softening of secrecy is that it has become impossible to hide the accumulated amount of information. On the other hand, encryption is increasingly used in civilian industries, which requires disclosure of information.

Target: Get acquainted with the history of the development of cryptography during the Great Patriotic War, master the encryption algorithm, cryptanalysis of messages.

Tasks:

Find out what encryption is, what ciphers were mainly used during the Second World War.

Find out what encryption machines were used by Russian and German intelligence.

Study the history of the creation and use of encryption machines in Russia during the Second World War.

And based on the material being studied, try to create your own code or cipher.

Main part

History of cryptography during World War II

Over the centuries-old history of using information encryption, mankind has invented many encryption methods or ciphers. Encryption method (cipher) is a set of reversible transformations of open information into private information in accordance with the encryption algorithm. Most encryption methods have not stood the test of time, and some are still in use today.

During the Second World War, complex technical and cryptographic means of protecting information became key in many ways, because the value of information increased exponentially. By June 1941, when the German armies invaded the territory of the USSR, our system for protecting state secrets was almost completely formed. She successfully completed a number of tasks assigned to her. All information resources were reliably protected from any foreign intelligence: mobilization, technical, military, political, ideological and natural.

The development of technical information security has not stood still. Just a few years ago, manual encryption methods were widely used, which took a huge amount of time and were not effective enough. Thus, encrypting a small order took up to 6 hours of work, and approximately the same amount of time was required to decipher the received message.

In 1937, in Leningrad, at the plant “209”, a high-secrecy equipment plant was formed. His main task was the creation of encryption technology for covert command and control of troops: in 1939, an encryption machine was created, which was called the M-100. The main disadvantage of this machine was their enormous weight. The device weighed 141 kilograms.

In 1939, the K-37 “Crystal” encryption machine was put into mass production, which was packaged in a box weighing only 19 kilograms. By the beginning of the war, over 150 sets of K-37 encryption devices had been adopted into service by the USSR cipher organs.

During the war years, enormous loads were placed on machine encryption communications. During the war, the Red Army encryption service (8th department) alone processed 1.5 million cipher telegrams and codegrams. Very often, department employees had to process up to 1,500 ciphergrams per day, while the daily norm was only 400 ciphergrams. During the entire war, the 8th Directorate of the General Staff sent out almost 3.3 million sets of ciphers to lower units and troops.

All these shortcomings made it difficult for the scouts who were on the front line or behind enemy lines. A slightly different technique was needed that would be more mobile.

At the end of the First World War and in the first years after it, several inventions appeared, created by amateurs for whom this was a kind of hobby.

According to Anglo-American historians, if not for this hobby, the war would have lasted two years longer.

One of these inventions is a encryption machine called Enigma. For the general public, the word "Enigma" (in Greek - a riddle) is synonymous with the concepts of "cipher machine" and "code breaking", which can be learned from films about submarines and similar novels that have little to do with reality. Little is known to the general public about the fact that there were other encryption machines, for which special decryption machines were created to “break”, and about the consequences that this had in the Second World War.

The first - Model A - was large, heavy (65x45x35 cm, 50 kg), similar to a cash register. Model B already looked like an ordinary typewriter. The reflector appeared in 1926 on the truly portable Model C (28x34x15 cm, 12 kg). These were commercial devices with encryption without much resistance to hacking, and there was no interest in them. It appeared in 1927 with the Model D, which later worked on the railways and in occupied Eastern Europe. In 1928, Enigma G, aka Enigma I, aka “Wehrmacht Enigma” appeared; having a patch panel, it was distinguished by enhanced cryptographic resistance and worked in the ground forces and air force.

Enigma translated into Russian means “riddle”. The very appearance of this encryption machine is also a mystery. Its inventor, the Dutchman Hugo Koch de Delft, who conceived it back in 1919, intended to use the encryption machine for civilian purposes. Somewhat later, the German Arthur Schernbus acquired a patent for it and called the machine "Enigma". The Reichswehr headquarters showed keen interest in its original coding method. As an experiment, several copies of Enigma were installed in 1926 on some warships. After the first tests, they decided to equip three armies with them. The design of this encryption machine is quite simple. An unencrypted message is entered into one of its departments. After passing through the machine, under the influence of various electrical impulses, it turns into ciphertext and is output from another part of the machine. The key, which is constantly changing, is held by another Enigma that receives the message. It passes through it in the opposite direction, and the text turns from encrypted to plain. The machine is easy to operate. Its main advantage is safety. Even having acquired the car, the enemy will not be able to use it: it reliably keeps its secrets, and a regularly changing key very soon, in a month at most, will make it a trophy museum exhibit.

How and why it was possible to develop machine methods of “hacking” and successfully use them.

There is too little information about this, it is classified. And the available information is usually either insufficient or unreliable. This is all the more regrettable because the breaking of encryption codes was of extremely important historical significance for the course of the war, since the allies (in the anti-Hitler coalition), thanks to the information obtained in this way, had significant advantages, they were able to compensate for some omissions of the first half of the war and were able to optimally use their resources in the second half of the war.

In September 1932, Polish intelligence attracted three young people to the development - mathematicians, top-class specialists - Marian Rezhevsky, Tadeusz Lisitsky and Henryk Zygalsky. After a series of unsuccessful experiments, they still determine the mechanical processes occurring in Enigma. In accordance with their instructions, the Polish company ABA reproduces 17 copies of the German cipher machine, as well as its individual parts. But for now all this lies as a dead weight in the laboratories of department R, and the intercepted German encryption is collecting dust in the archive.

Luck came unexpectedly. In June 1931, a certain Hans-Thilo Schmidt appeared at the French embassy in Berlin, offering to hand over instructions for using a cipher machine and cipher tables used by the Reichswehr after June 1, 1930. I couldn't have asked for anything better.

In December 1938, the Germans significantly improved the Enigma by installing two additional drums into it. But Rezhevsky, Lisitsky and Zygalsky are making enormous progress: they created a real calculating machine, the ancestor of the computer, which they called the “Bomb”. However, the exhibition shared this discovery with the French only on June 30, 1939, two months before the start of the war.

As a result of joint efforts, by March 1940, decryption machines were operating at full capacity. In England it was the source of "Ultra" - the equivalent of the French "Zed".

On February 27, 1940, at a meeting in Lugano (Switzerland) with the French intelligence officer Navarre, Schmidt said that the SD had managed to obtain evidence in Warsaw that the Poles had managed to construct an analogue of the Enigma machine, and now the cipherstelle (encryption service) was conducting a corresponding investigation.

At dawn on May 10, 1940, the panzer corps under the command of Rudolf Schmidt, Reinhard and Guderian began their offensive. On June 22, it was all over, and France signed the surrender in the same carriage in which the Germans signed the surrender in November 1918.

Although defeat in the summer of 1940 was not prevented, the efforts of the intelligence services of Poland, France and Great Britain were not in vain, but served well during subsequent military operations. At Bletchley Park, Turing completed the creation of the Colossus, a computer capable of greatly speeding up the deciphering of Enigma ciphers, now up to 24 hours.

On August 1 and 8, 1940, orders from Goering's headquarters to prepare the Luftwaffe for a massive attack on English air bases were intercepted, and on August 12, an order for the first such raid. The Royal Air Force command was able to provide the necessary counteraction.

Subsequently, British air defense regularly received information about upcoming raids. But for the sake of conspiracy, the British once even had to sacrifice an entire city and its population. This happened when a message was intercepted about an upcoming massive raid on Coventry. In order to prevent information leaking that the British were reading German radiograms, no measures were taken to defend Coventry, and the city was completely destroyed.

The Germans never learned that the Enigma secret was known to the Allies.

Since 1939, first the Poles, and after them the French and especially the British, had the opportunity to use decrypted Enigma messages and throughout the war with Germany to know the most important plans of the Wehrmacht, including on the eastern front. Allied obligations provided for the exchange of such information with the USSR, which bore the brunt of the war on its shoulders.

Hacking the Enigma codes provided the Anglo-Saxons with access to almost all the secret information of the Third Reich (all armed forces, SS, SD, Foreign Ministry, post office, transport, economy), gave great strategic advantages, and helped them win victories with little bloodshed.

"Battle of Britain" (1940): Having difficulty repelling the German air pressure, in April the British began reading Luftwaffe radiograms. This helped them to properly operate their last reserves, and they won the battle. Without breaking Enigma, a German invasion of England would have been very likely. “Battle of the Atlantic” (1939-1945): Without taking the enemy from the air, Hitler strangled him with a blockade. In 1942, 1,006 ships with a displacement of 5.5 million gross tons were sunk. It seemed that just a little more and Britain would fall to its knees. But the British, reading the coded communications of the “wolves,” began to mercilessly drown them and won the battle.

Operation Overlord (1945): Before the landing in Normandy, the Allies knew from the transcript about all German countermeasures to repel the landing, every day they received accurate data on positions and defense forces.

The Germans constantly improved Enigma. Operators were trained to destroy it in case of danger. During the war, keys were changed every 8 hours. Cipher documents dissolved in water.

The creators of the “Riddle” were also right: it is in principle impossible to decipher its messages manually. What if the enemy opposes this machine with his own? But that’s exactly what he did: capturing new pieces of equipment, he improved his “anti-Enigma”.

The Germans themselves made the enemy’s job easier. So, they had an “indicator procedure”: at the beginning of the ciphergram, the setting was sent twice (rotor number / their starting positions), where a natural similarity was visible between the 1st and 4th, 2nd and 5th, 3rd and 6 characters. The Poles noticed this back in 1932 and cracked the code. A significant security hole was the weather reports. Submariners received them from the base “reliably” encrypted. On land, the same data was encrypted in the usual way - and now in the hands of crackers there is already a set of known combinations, and it is already clear which rotors work, how the key is built. Deciphering was facilitated by the standard language of messages, where expressions and words were often repeated. So, every day at 6:00 the weather service gave an encrypted forecast. The word "weather" was required, and clumsy German grammar placed it in its exact place in the sentence. Also: the Germans often used the words “Vaterland” and “Reich”. The British had employees with their native German language (native speakers). Putting themselves in the place of the enemy coder, they searched through a lot of encryption for the presence of these words - and brought the victory over Enigma closer. It also helped that at the beginning of the session the radio operator always indicated the call sign of the boat. Knowing all their call signs, the British determined the rotor scheme, obtaining approximate cipher combinations of some characters. “Forced information” was used. So, the British bombed the port of Calais, and the Germans gave an encryption, and in it - already known words! Decryption was made easier by the laziness of some radio operators, who did not change the settings for 2-3 days.

Perhaps the most famous example is Churchill's warning to Stalin at the end of May 1941 that Hitler was going to attack the USSR. It is also known that in June 1943, Churchill informed Stalin about the impending offensive of German troops in the area of ​​Orel, Kursk and Belgorod. Several other similar warnings are known, but it is characteristic that almost all of them were made not when messages about the Wehrmacht’s plans on the eastern front were deciphered at Bletchley Park, but much later, immediately on the eve of certain events, when there was too much time left to take the necessary measures. little time.

Fortunately, Soviet intelligence did not wait for Churchill to show goodwill and throughout the war sought not so much to rely on the help of the allies, but to obtain strategic information on its own.

On the eve of the Great Patriotic War, our codebreakers warned the country's leadership about the German attack. During the war, Soviet codebreaking services provided the political and military leadership of the USSR with a large amount of vital information. This information was received during all the most important battles (including the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, etc.) and contributed to our victories. At the same time, the encryption service did not allow the enemy to obtain information about our plans and actions. This is how the famous commanders of the Great Patriotic War evaluate the work of Soviet cryptographers. G.K. Zhukov: “The good work of cryptographers helped win more than one battle,” A.M. Vasilevsky: “Not a single report about the upcoming military-strategic operations of our army became the property of fascist intelligence services.” The enemy also appreciated the work of the Soviet encryption service. Here is an excerpt from the interrogation of the chief of staff at the headquarters of the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces, Colonel General A. Jodl, dated June 17, 1945: “... we have never been able to intercept and decipher radiograms from your headquarters, front and army headquarters.”

In the Soviet Union, high-class mathematicians were attracted to the cryptographic service only in the late 40s, when the lessons of the war forced the government to radically reconsider its attitude towards it. In 1949, the Main Directorate of Special Communications (GUSS) was created under the CPSU Central Committee. This meant that the cryptographic service was removed from the security agencies and was subordinate directly to the political leadership of the country, that is, it rose to a completely different level. Significant financial and material resources were used to strengthen and expand it. The Department of Applied Mathematics of the Steklov Mathematical Institute, which was organized at the same time and later grew into a large institute, was headed by M. V. Keldysh. It was assumed that Keldysh’s department would work, as they say, “on space,” and OPR would work on cryptography. However, not everything was simple. Cadres of cryptographer mathematicians began to be trained on the basis of Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov.

What were Soviet encryption machines like?

Until recently there was almost no information about this.

“... whoever captures a Russian cryptographic operator or captures a Russian encryption machine will be awarded the Iron Cross, home leave and will be provided with work in Berlin, and after victory - an estate in Crimea.” These words of Hitler make a lot clear. Since 1942, messages from Russian technology have ceased to be intercepted. It was a success for the encryption service!

During the war, machine encryption carried the main burden when transmitting secret telegrams: the bulky M-100s were replaced by the more compact M-101 (“Emerald”).

Manual encryption was also widely used. Telegrams were sent using light, three kilogram radio stations “Sever” (B.P. Aseev - design engineer, inventor, scientist), or “Severok”, as they were affectionately called by military signalmen. This equipment, which quickly won the sympathy of our intelligence officers, was produced in besieged Leningrad. The uniqueness of the radio station lay in its portability (the weight of the transceiver is about 2 kg), autonomous power supply and the ability to operate in a smooth range. In besieged Leningrad, by the end of 1942, about 2,000 radio stations were produced per month, and over 3,000 scouts worked on them in partisan detachments and reconnaissance groups behind enemy lines.

The role of the Sever radio station in the Great Patriotic War is rightly compared with the appearance of the famous Katyusha rocket and artillery installations in the Red Army. Many commanders of armies and fronts, going on inspection trips to active units, took with them a radio operator with a Severk. A military radio station of this class with power sources (manual drive) weighed about 50 kg and was serviced by two soldiers.

Radio operators with the Sever radio station ensured the success of the combat operations of the famous partisan formations of A. S. Kovpak, A. F. Fedorov, I. N. Banov and the vast majority of smaller partisan detachments and reconnaissance groups operating in the rear of the Nazi troops. The German command promised a high reward to those who captured the Sever radio station along with the radio operator. Not a single punitive detachment succeeded in this, since the radio operators, even when wounded, managed to destroy the radio station or blew themselves up along with it.

Decoding ciphers

I present the decoding of the most famous ciphers during the Second World War using the Excel spreadsheet editor.

Caesar's cipher - all spy ciphers have been developed on the basis of it, starting from the 10th century BC. The basis is a shift of one letter to the right by one character.

The Vizhner cipher consists of a (square) matrix of letters of the Russian alphabet. A character is encrypted by shifting the letter in each line of the alphabet one position to the right.

It is easy to realize that in real life, documents can use not only letters of the Russian alphabet, but also the Latin alphabet, numbers, punctuation marks, etc. Making a Vizner square using all these symbols is still an epic, but there is another, much simpler way using the =CODESYMBOL function.

Conclusion

Comparing the ciphers of Russia with the ciphers of other developed countries, it should be concluded that at least in terms of cryptographic strength, as well as a number of other criteria, including (to a certain extent) criteria characterizing performance qualities, domestic ciphers were not inferior to the ciphers of such advanced countries, like England, France, Italy. The types of codes and polyalphabetic ciphers in use in Russia were approximately the same as in the above countries. Russian cryptographers successfully deciphered the correspondence of these countries, creatively assimilating the achievements of foreign cryptography.

Literature

Encryption in Russia, - http://studopedia.net/7_20756_shifrovanie-a-rossii.html

History of encryption, T. Soboleva, online reader, http://coollib.net/b/175644/read.

B.P. Aseev - design engineer, inventor, scientist, N. Mamaev http://www.pcweek.ru/themes/detail.php?ID=57864&THEME_ID=15499

The Bombe machine, developed by British mathematician Alan Turing, was of great importance during the Second World War. Turing's invention helped crack German messages encoded by the legendary Enigma machine.

The Turing machine significantly increased the speed of decoding intercepted German messages. This allowed Allied forces to respond to classified intelligence within hours rather than weeks.

Much has been said about Turing's genius, his troubled personal life and his tragically early death. Hollywood even made a film about him. But how much do you know about the machine he built, the principle of hacking the machine, and the impact it had on the course of the war?

We share unknown facts about Turing's invention.

1. Turing didn’t come up with his machine himself.

In fact, Turing's ingenious invention, the Bombe machine, is a continuation of the work of Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki.

Poland's Bombe succeeded thanks to a flaw in German encryption that double-encrypted the first three letters at the beginning of each message, allowing codebreakers to look for patterns.

Exactly how the Bombe machine worked remains a mystery, but by using six of these machines in parallel, the all-important Enigma Ringstellung (the order of the coding ring) could be discovered in just in a couple of hours.

2. The Germans perfected Enigma

At some point, German cryptographers discovered and fixed the weakness of double encryption. Then the British needed a more advanced solution, and Turing and his team got involved in the work.

Using information provided by the Poles, Turing began hacking Enigma messages using his own "computer".

His methods were based on the assumption that every message contained a cheat sheet - a known piece of German plaintext at a familiar location in the message.

In one example it was weather forecast in Atlantic, which was recorded in the same format every day. Location detection equipment at listening stations allowed codebreakers to determine where a message was coming from, and if it matched the location of a weather station, it was likely that the word "wettervorhersage" (weather forecast) would be present in every message.

Another curious clue for Turing was Enigma's inability to encode a letter as itself. That is, S could never have been S.

3. Enigma has become almost perfect

Even taking into account all the disadvantages of Enigma, it was difficult to crack the code almost impossible. There was not enough time or manpower to work out all possible combinations. This is due to the fact that each letter, when entered into the Enigma machine, was encrypted differently each time.

So, even if you guessed one keyword that offered hints, it took reduce the odds 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 to 1– the exact number of ways to configure Enigma machines.

Moreover, every day a new code had to be cracked to account for the Germans changing the settings at midnight.

4. Turing's team did the opposite

Instead of guessing the key, Bombe used logic to reject certain possibilities. As Arthur Conan Doyle said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how incredible, must be true.”

This method, although successful, still provided a range of possible correct answers for the German ring settings. So more work needed to be done to narrow it down to the right one.

Using testing machine process repeated until the correct answer was found.

This gave the crackers part of the key, but not all of it. Then you had to use what you learned and figure out the rest of the key.

Once the code was cracked, Turing's team would set up an Enigma machine with the correct key of the day and decipher every message intercepted that day.

5. Turing machine today costs 320 million rubles

The "bombs" were 7 feet wide, 6 feet 6 inches tall and literally weighed a ton. They had 12 miles of wires(!) and 97,000 different parts.

The decoder prototype was built at a cost of £100,000, equivalent to around £4 million today. Almost 320 million rubles at the current exchange rate!

In essence, the Turing bomb was an electromechanical machine consisting of 36 different Enigma machines, each containing the exact internal wiring of the German equivalent.

When "Bomb" is turned on, each of the riddles is allocated a pair of letters from the resulting cheat sheet text (for example, when D becomes T in a guessed word).

Each of the three rotors moves at a speed simulating the Enigma itself, testing approximately 17,500 possible positions until a match is found.

6. Turing's genius influenced the outcome of the war

After the Enigma machine was broken, 211 Bombe machines were built and operated around the clock. They were placed in various locations throughout Britain in case of possible explosions that could destroy these very complex and expensive samples.

Due to a shortage of captured Enigma machines, British Typex cipher machines were converted to working Enigma machines.

The fully decrypted messages were translated from German into English and then passed on to British intelligence.

At its peak, the Bombe machine could hack up to 3000 German messages per day. By the end of the war, she had handled 2.5 million messages, many of which gave the Allies vital information about German positions and strategy.
It is assumed that this knowledge played an important role in key battles.

According to many experts, Turing's invention shortened the war by two years.

Bank of England to issue £50 note in Turing's honor

Almost at any time of the year, the English countryside looks the same: green meadows, cows, medieval-looking houses and a wide sky - sometimes gray, sometimes dazzling blue. It was just transitioning from the first mode to the more rare second mode when the commuter train rushed me to Bletchley station. It’s hard to imagine that surrounded by these picturesque hills, the foundations of computer science and cryptography were laid. However, the upcoming walk through the most interesting museum dispelled all possible doubts.

Such a picturesque place, of course, was not chosen by the British by chance: inconspicuous barracks with green roofs, located in a remote village, were just what was needed to hide a top-secret military facility where they were constantly working on breaking the codes of the Axis countries. Bletchley Park may not look impressive from the outside, but the work that was done here helped turn the tide of the war.

Crypto hacks

In wartime, people entered Bletchley Park through the main gate by presenting a security pass, but now they buy a ticket at the entrance. I stayed there a little longer to look at the adjacent souvenir shop and temporary exhibition dedicated to First World War intelligence technologies (by the way, also an interesting topic). But the main thing lay ahead.

Bletchley Park itself is about twenty long one-story buildings, which in English are called hut, and in Russian are usually translated as “house”. I silently called them “huts,” combining one with the other. In addition to them, there is a mansion (aka Mansion), where the command worked and distinguished guests were received, as well as several auxiliary buildings: former stables, a garage, residential buildings for staff.

Each house has its own number, and these numbers have historical significance; you will definitely find them in any story about Bletchley Park. In the sixth, for example, intercepted messages were received, in the eighth they were engaged in cryptanalysis (Alan Turing worked there), in the eleventh there were computers - “bombs”. The fourth house was later allocated for work on the version of Enigma that was used in the navy, the seventh - for the Japanese variation on the Enigma theme and other ciphers, in the fifth they analyzed transmissions intercepted in Italy, Spain and Portugal, as well as German police encryption. And so on.

You can visit the houses in any order. The furnishings in most of them are very similar: old furniture, old things, tattered notebooks, posters and maps from the Second World War. All this, of course, did not lie here for eighty years: the houses were first transferred from one state organization to another, then they were abandoned, and only in 2014 did restorers meticulously restore them, saving them from demolition and turning them into a museum.

This, as is customary in England, was approached not only carefully, but also with imagination: in many rooms, the voices of actors and sounds are heard from hidden speakers, which create the impression that work is in full swing around. You walk in and hear the clatter of a typewriter, someone's footsteps and a radio in the distance, and then you "overhear" someone's animated conversation about a recently intercepted encryption.

But the real curiosity is the projections. For example, this man, who seemed to be sitting at the table, greeted me and briefly told me about the local customs.

The most interesting thing, of course, was to look at Alan Turing's desk. His office is located in house eight and looks very modest.

Well, you can look at Turing’s creation itself - the Enigma deciphering machine - in house number 11 - in the same place where the very first model of the “bomb” was assembled at one time.

Cryptological bomb

This may be news to you, but Alan Turing was not the first to decrypt Enigma using brute force. His work is preceded by research by Polish cryptographer Marian Rejewski. By the way, it was he who called the decryption machine a “bomb.”

Why "bomb"? There are several different versions. For example, according to one, this was supposedly the name of a variety of ice cream beloved by Rejewski and his colleagues, which was sold in a cafe not far from the encryption bureau of the Polish General Staff, and they borrowed this name. A much simpler explanation is that in Polish the word "bomb" can be used to make an exclamation like "eureka!" Well, a very simple option: the car was ticking like a bomb.

Shortly before the capture of Poland by Germany, Polish engineers handed over to the British all the developments related to decoding German ciphers, including drawings of the “bomb”, as well as a working copy of Enigma - not a German, but a Polish clone, which they managed to develop before the invasion. The rest of the Poles' developments were destroyed so that Hitler's intelligence would not suspect anything.

The problem was that the Polish version of the “bomb” was designed only for the Enigma I machine with three fixed rotors. Even before the start of the war, the Germans introduced improved versions of Enigma, where the rotors were replaced every day. This made the Polish version completely unusable.

If you've seen The Imitation Game, you're already quite familiar with the setting at Bletchley Park. However, the director could not resist and made several digressions from real historical events. In particular, Turing did not create the prototype of the “bomb” with his own hands and never called it “Christopher”.

Popular English actor Cryptocode Podbirac as Alan Turing

Based on the Polish machine and the theoretical work of Alan Turing, engineers at the British Tabulating Machine Company created the “bombs” that were supplied to Bletchley Park and other secret facilities. By the end of the war, there were already 210 vehicles, but with the end of hostilities, all “bombs” were destroyed by order of Winston Churchill.

Why did the British authorities need to destroy such a wonderful data center? The fact is that the “bomb” is not a universal computer - it is intended exclusively for decoding messages encrypted by Enigma. As soon as this was no longer needed, the machines also became unnecessary, and their components could be sold off.

Another reason may have been the premonition that the Soviet Union would not be Britain's best friend in the future. What if the USSR (or anywhere else) began to use technology similar to Enigma? Then it is better not to demonstrate to anyone the ability to break its ciphers quickly and automatically.

Only two "bombs" survived from wartime - they were transferred to GCHQ, the UK Government Communications Center (think of it as the modern equivalent of Bletchley Park). They say they were dismantled in the sixties. But GCHQ graciously agreed to provide the museum at Bletchley with old drawings of the “bombs” - alas, not in the best condition and not entirely. Nevertheless, enthusiasts managed to restore them, and then create several reconstructions. They are now in the museum.

It’s interesting that during the war, the production of the first “bomb” took about twelve months, but the reconstructors from the BCS Computer Conservation Society, starting in 1994, worked for about twelve years. Which, of course, is not surprising, given that they had no resources other than their savings and garages.

How did Enigma work?

So, “bombs” were used to decrypt messages that were obtained after encryption with Enigma. But how exactly does she do this? Of course, we will not analyze its electromechanical circuit in detail, but it is interesting to know the general principle of operation. At least, it was interesting for me to listen and write down this story from the words of a museum employee.

The design of the “bomb” is largely determined by the design of the Enigma itself. Actually, we can consider that a “bomb” is several dozen “Enigmas” put together in such a way as to sort out the possible settings of the encryption machine.

The simplest Enigma is a three-rotor one. It was widely used by the Wehrmacht, and its design meant that it could be used by the average soldier, not a mathematician or engineer. It works very simply: if the operator presses, say, P, a light will light up under one of the letters on the panel, for example under the letter Q. All that remains is to convert it into Morse code and transmit it.

An important point: if you press P again, there is a very small chance of getting Q again. Because every time you press the button, the rotor moves one position and changes the configuration of the electrical circuit. Such a cipher is called polyalphabetic.

Look at the three rotors at the top. If you, for example, enter Q on the keyboard, then Q will first be replaced by Y, then by S, by N, then reflected (it turns out K), changed again three times and the output will be U. Thus, Q will be encoded as U. But what if I type U? It turns out Q! This means the cipher is symmetric. This was very convenient for military applications: if two places had Enigmas with the same settings, messages could be freely transmitted between them.

This scheme, however, has a big drawback: when entering the letter Q, due to the reflection at the end, under no circumstances could it be obtained Q. German engineers knew about this feature, but did not attach much importance to it, but the British found an opportunity to exploit it . How did the British know about the insides of the Enigma? The fact is that it was based on a completely unsecret development. The first patent for it was filed in 1919 and described a machine for banks and financial institutions that allowed the exchange of encrypted messages. It was sold on the open market, and British intelligence managed to purchase several copies. By their example, by the way, the British Typex encryption machine was made, in which the defect described above was corrected.

The standard Enigma had three rotors, but in total you could choose from five options and install each of them in any slot. This is exactly what is reflected in the second column - the numbers of the rotors in the order in which they are supposed to be installed in the machine. Thus, already at this stage it was possible to obtain sixty settings options. Next to each rotor there is a ring with letters of the alphabet (in some versions of the machine - the corresponding numbers). The settings for these rings are in the third column. The widest column is an invention of German cryptographers, which was not in the original Enigma. Here are the settings that are set using the plug panel by connecting letters in pairs. This confuses the whole scheme and turns it into a difficult puzzle. If you look at the bottom line of our table (the first day of the month), the settings will be as follows: rotors III, I and IV are placed in the machine from left to right, the rings next to them are set at 18, 24 and 15, and then the letters N are connected on the panel with plugs and P, J and V and so on. Taking all these factors into account, there are about 107,458,687,327,300,000,000,000 possible combinations - more than seconds have passed since the Big Bang. It is not surprising that the Germans considered this car extremely reliable.

There were many variants of Enigma, in particular, a variant with four rotors was used on submarines.

Hacking Enigma

Breaking the code, as usual, was made possible by the unreliability of people, their mistakes and predictability.

The Enigma manual says to select three of the five rotors. Each of the three horizontal sections of the “bomb” can check one possible position, that is, one machine can simultaneously run three out of sixty possible combinations. To check everything, you need either twenty “bombs” or twenty consecutive checks.

However, the Germans made a pleasant surprise for the English cryptographers. They introduced a rule according to which the same position of the rotors should not be repeated for a month, or for two days in a row. This sounds like it was supposed to improve reliability, but in reality it had the opposite effect. It turned out that by the end of the month the number of combinations that needed to be checked was significantly reduced.

The second thing that helped in decryption was traffic analysis. The British had been listening to and recording encrypted messages from Hitler's army since the beginning of the war. There was no talk of decryption at that time, but sometimes the fact of communication itself is important, plus such characteristics as the frequency at which the message was transmitted, its length, time of day, and so on. Also, using triangulation, it was possible to determine where the message was sent from.

A good example is the transmissions that came from the North Sea every day from the same locations, at the same time, on the same frequency. What could it be? It turned out that these were meteorological ships that reported daily weather data. What words might be contained in such a transmission? Of course, “weather forecast”! Such guesses pave the way for a method that today we call a plaintext attack, but in those days we called “cribs.”

Since we know that Enigma never outputs the same letters as the original message, we need to sequentially match the "hint" with each substring of the same length and see if there are any matches. If not, then this is a candidate string. For example, if we check the hint “weather in the Bay of Biscay” (Wettervorhersage Biskaya), we first write it opposite the encrypted string.

We see that the letter S is encrypted into itself. This means that the hint needs to be shifted by one character and checked again. In this case, several letters will match at once - move them again. R matches. We move twice more until we come across a potentially correct substring.

If we were dealing with a substitution cipher, then we could end there. But since this is a polyalphabetic cipher, we need settings and initial positions of the Enigma rotors. They were the ones who were picked up with the help of “bombs”. To do this, pairs of letters must first be numbered.

And then, based on this table, create a so-called “menu” - a diagram that shows which letter of the original message (that is, “hints”) is supposedly encrypted into which letter and in what position. The “bomb” is set up according to this scheme.

Each of the reels can take one of 26 positions - one for each letter of the alphabet. Behind each of the reels there are 26 contacts, which are connected in thick cables in such a way that the machine searches for settings on the plug panel that give sequential matches of the letters of the encrypted string with the hint.

Since the structure of the “bomb” does not take into account the switching device inside the Enigma, it produces several options during operation that the operator must check. Some of them will not work simply because in Enigma you can only connect one plug to one socket. If the settings are not suitable, the operator starts the machine again to get the next option. In about fifteen minutes, the “bomb” will go through all the options for the selected reel position. If it is guessed correctly, then all that remains is to select the settings of the rings - without automation (we won’t go into details). Then, on English Typex machines modified to be compatible with Enigma, the encryption was translated into clear text.

Thus, operating with a whole fleet of “bombs”, by the end of the war, the British received up-to-date settings every day even before breakfast. In total, the Germans had about fifty channels, many of which broadcast much more interesting things than the weather forecast.

Allowed to touch with hands

At the Bletchley Park Museum you can not only look around, but also touch the decipherment with your own hands. Including using touchscreen tables. Each of them gives his own task. In this, for example, it is proposed to combine Banburi sheets (Banburismus). This is an early method of deciphering Enigma, which was used before the creation of “bombs”. Alas, it was impossible to decipher something in this way during the day, and at midnight all successes turned into a pumpkin due to the next change in settings.

Dummy “data center” in Hut 11

What is in house number 11, where there used to be a “server room”, if all the “bombs” were destroyed in the last century? To be honest, I still deep down hoped to come here and find everything in the same form as before. Alas, no, but the hall is still not empty.

Here are these iron structures with plywood sheets. On some there are life-size photographs of “bombs”, on others there are quotes from the stories of those who worked here. They were mostly women, including from the WAF, the women's service of the Royal Air Force. The quote in the picture tells us that switching cables and looking after the “bombs” was not an easy task at all, but an exhausting daily work. By the way, another series of projections is hidden between the dummies. The girl tells her friend that she had no idea where she would serve, and is completely amazed by what is happening at Bletchley. Well, I was also amazed by the unusual exhibit!

I spent a total of five hours at Bletchley Park. This was barely enough to get a good look at the central part and a glimpse of everything else. It was so interesting that I didn’t even notice how time passed until my legs began to ache and ask to go back - if not to the hotel, then at least to the train.

And besides the houses, dimly lit offices, restored “bombs” and long stands with accompanying texts, there was something to see. I have already mentioned the hall dedicated to espionage during the First World War, there was also a hall about the decryption of Lorenz and the creation of the Colossus computer. By the way, in the museum I discovered the “Colossus” itself, or rather the part that the reenactors managed to build.

For the most resilient, a small museum of computer history awaits outside Bletchley Park, where you can get acquainted with how computer technology developed after Turing. I also looked there, but walked quickly. I've already seen enough of BBC Micro and Spectrum in other places - you can do this, for example, at the Chaos Constructions festival in St. Petersburg. But you won’t find a living “bomb” anywhere.

“If it weren’t for the Navajos, we would never have taken Iwo Jima.”. The Pacific island of Iwo Jima is famous for hosting one of the bloodiest battles in the history of World War II. A sophisticated reader may think that the above words belong to a lover of Westerns and war films. In fact, they were uttered by Iwo Jima veteran Major Howard Connor, a signal officer of the 5th US Marine Division. Military historians and tacticians today agree with his opinion.

Connor was referring to the famed Navajo radio operators who were honored in 1992 at the Pentagon for their unique and significant contribution to the US victory in the Pacific.

The Japanese were reputed to be skilled codebreakers, which posed an almost insoluble problem to the US command in the Pacific theater of operations. According to the chief of Japanese intelligence, Lieutenant General Seitso Arisue, Japanese specialists could freely solve any codes of the US Army and Air Force - except for the code used by the Marine Corps.

The situation was like this: in 1942, the son of a missionary, Philip Johnston, convinced the command of the Marine Corps that the language of the Navajo - an Indian tribe of the American southwest - was ideal as the basis for an unbreakable cipher. Johnston grew up on the Navajo reservation and was one of the few "outsiders" who spoke their language fluently.

Although the Navajo language has no written language - no alphabet, no symbols of any kind - it cannot in the least be called a "primitive, half-developed" language. (Of course, this will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows the true history of the world as recorded in the Bible, and understands that “primitive languages” simply do not exist). In fact, the Navajo language was remarkably complex; its structure and tone made it incomprehensible to anyone who was not a Navajo or had not undergone a long and arduous course of study. At that time, only about 30 “outsiders” in the entire world spoke Navajo, and the Japanese were not among them.

In May 1942, the first Navajo group of 29 people arrived at a special base and began developing a cipher. Their main task was to transmit combat information and orders by telephone and radio. Tests have shown that Navajos can encode, transmit and decipher a three-line message in English in 20 seconds - 90 times faster than required by machines of the time.

The essence of the cipher was as follows: each letter of an English word was transmitted as a Navajo word, which, when translated into English, began with that letter. Thus, the letter “a” could be expressed in several words in Navajo, for example: “tse-nill” (axe, ax), “woll-la-chi” (ant), and “be-la-sana” (apple). ). For greater speed of transmission, some military terms were defined by one Navajo word. Thus, “besh-lo” (Iron Fish) meant a submarine, and “da-he-ti-hi” (hummingbird) meant a fighter.

In the heart of the Battle of Iwo Jima, six Navajo radio operators worked tirelessly around the clock for the first two days of the battle. These six sent and received more than 800 messages and did not make a single mistake.

In total, about 400 Indian code talkers served in the Pacific theater. Their skill, speed and accuracy are legendary. From 1942 to 1945, they participated in every Marine assault in the Pacific. Because the Navajo code was so valuable, it remained secret after World War II. Therefore, the hero radio operators remained “in the shadows” for a long time, and their feat remained unknown to most people.

There are interesting parallels between this Navajo story and biology. Inside not only each of us, but also all living beings, there is a code written in the language of chemical compounds along the “ridge” of the well-known DNA molecule. In this code, ensuring the vital functions of all organisms. How such a code could appear in the evolutionary scenario of the origin of species (in which there can be nothing mysterious) is one of the biggest mysteries over which venerable evolutionists puzzle. Following the path of their beliefs, they come across two insurmountable obstacles.

First, true information is not produced by natural processes (that is, outside the work of thought - or a program that comes from an intelligent source). If someone says otherwise, ask them to give an example and accurately define information. Stories about “something similar” and “similar analogies” are excluded - only documented examples based on facts. Observational readings might be the most accurate - but if such observations were actually recorded, the observers would be awarded a Nobel Prize!

Secondly, (and this is directly related to our story about Navajo military achievements), any code is useless if the recipient does not know how to decipher it.

Therefore, we need to assume that in the imaginary “primitive cell” from which, according to evolutionary views, life on the “primitive Earth” arose, in some completely incomprehensible, mysterious way the information for the production of one functional protein arose. Natural selection cannot help us in any way here: it requires the initial presence of a self-reproducing organism. Thus, we have to consider the arrangement of thousands of “letters” in a certain sequence to be pure chance. This assumption in itself is absurd due to its extreme improbability.

But even if we admit the possibility of the emergence of such a “launching pad,” the existence of the resulting code will be completely useless without the already existing complex mechanism capable of recognizing all the chemical “letters” of the DNA molecule and simultaneously translating them into the corresponding amino acids. The Japanese easily gained access to Navajo messages, but the messages were of no use to them. Without a “translation mechanism” (knowledge of the language and the ability to apply it correctly), the messages were a series of meaningless sounds.

Thus, the very idea of ​​a molecule evolving into a person has no basis and is powerless to explain anything even with the richest imagination. All efforts to solve this evolutionary mystery are doomed to failure - just as the attempts of Hitler's Germany and its allies6 to crack the Navajo code known today failed. And, remarkably, the reason for these two failures is the same.

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RADIO CRYPTER OPERATORS

American Indian languages ​​were repeatedly used to encrypt messages. Thus, during the First World War against Germany, eight members of the Choctaw tribe helped the US Army encrypt military reports.

To avoid detection, there was not a single written document with a Navajo code. The 400-odd original designations for military terms not found in the Navajo language (such as “submarine”) were not to be spelled out and were learned by heart.

The most important thing in warfare is the security of information transmission. High-ranking military officers are convinced that without Navajo radio operators, World War II, and with it the entire course of history, could have had a completely different outcome. Imagine what would have happened if Philip Johnston's parents had not sacrificed everything to serve and evangelize the Navajo Nation!...