Group items tagged

Gives a description of all of the machines used or developed at Bletchley Park for use in cryptanalysis. 

A basic overview of the Siemens T-43 cipher machine used by the Germans, the first mixer machine of its kind.

This article describes how, during the Cold War, the major distributor of cryptography machines (Crypto AG) worked with the NSA. This professional relationship provided the NSA with shortcuts on how to break ciphers created from the different machines. Also, Crypto AG was revealed as not having given the most up to date models to all countries, probably through deception. This raises the question of morality involving basic warfare. How is it moral for this supposedly trusted third party company to have special allegiances with the United States?Would the United States have the same opinion on this actions morality if they were the ones being sold out of date equipment? Or if one of their opponents had shortcuts?

"Richard, 10, has made this Bombe machine out of Lego, complete with wires on the back."

I'm just going to resubmit the bookmark directly to this page so I'll be sure it ends up publicly in the group. This wasn't mentioned in Singh chapter 2, but it was created around the time period discussed in the chapter. (Plus, it's one of my favorite articles I've read in Wired so I really wanted to use it as a bookmark.) The article discusses the strategies used to break this cipher, some of which, such as frequency analysis, we have talked about in class. It's also just fascinating to read about the Oculists and their history.

This source gives a variety of examples in which encryption is used for security everyday, like ATM machines and DVD players. It seems like this is a pretty useful list because it goes into sufficient enough depth to describing the different examples, and specifically explains how encryption comes into play - without making it too long or hard to understand.