Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union
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- čas přidán 14. 05. 2024
- Codes and ciphers are built for protecting secrets. The National Security Agency was built to break them. How did the NSA come to be and how did its cryptanalysts crack some of the most complicated codes of the twentieth century?
Stephen Budiansky, author of Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union, will trace the history of the agency and its remarkable successes and destructive failures during the Cold War when the USSR was the ultimate target.
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My mother still knows how to run Colossus at Bletchley Park NMoC. She's 97 now.
What did she go on to do afterwards? Anything computer related?
Budianski's books are the very best in this field IMO.
Speaker intro begins at 2:25; actual talk begins at 5:05.
Thank you time traveller.
I can’t recommend this guy’s book ‘Code Warriors ‘more strongly. Some of the Amazon reviews say it is too technical as an audiobook and that it’s too in-depth in general. I so strongly disagree. Absolutely love that he respects his readers to give us an advanced, (well advanced for a lay person anyway) glimpse at this world. It is so fascinating and well paced. Plus he’s funny in this lecture. Really like this guy.
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Fascinating channel, thanks very much
My Great Grandfather was a cryptographer. He had fought battles on the islands, the snowy mountains, and then in the shadows. He lived a long live, I barely knew him though, I was too young to remember very much.
As always a brilliant talk. As the producer of The Bletchley Park Podcast, I’m always happy to hear us mentioned.
I was also lucky enough to record when the current directors of the NSA & GCHQ met at Bletchley Park to celebrate, 75 years later, the visit of those first 4 US codebreakers.
Mark, I'm surprised that no one had mentioned Gordon Welchman and his part in helping Alan Turing, while at Bletchley Park. Welchman was written out of history...
Great topic, but hopefully he'll touch upon why sometime they had actionable data and didn't use it. We owe inumerable amount of gratitude for the silent heros.
Excellent presentation
Glad I found this channel:interesting content, thanks
Philbyd 123 n
Same
Brilliant.
What is not mentioned is that the NSA got a huge break post war because there had been a bag job done at the soviet consulate , photographing a huge number of documents before they were encoded. The coded version was available from the wire services (any telegram going out from the US would be copied and the Russians and British knew this). Now many of these encoded items really did not need to be - they purchasing documents. They were very formulaic so for instance you knew where the date and the name of the issuing city would be. Often the opening address would be the same. This would give a rabbit hole into the layout of the one time pad that had been used to construct this message. That's the simple version . What complicates matters is that the russkies and germans would use a dictionary which allocated four digit groups to a whole word. But reissuing the dictionaries was painful and did not happen that much with the Russians.
Brilliant informative exposition. I noted that you showed a photograph of Gordon Welchman, but did not attribute his contribution to traffic analysis.
Do not forget Gordon Welshman and Tom Jericho he broke the German U boat enigma 4,000000,000,000, combinations
As a partial history it is one of the best
It is full of lies. The guy doesn't even know who actually broke the enigma.
Wowoe! he so decorated academically
Michigan Agricultural College is today's Michigan State University.
By education, both undergraduate and graduate degrees, I am a mathematician.
Although I never spent a tremendous amount of time on the subject of coding I did spend some time on this subset of mathematics and I found it immensely interesting, and dare I say beautiful too. Unfortunately I suspect for many it's a topic similar to Rembrandt's "The Night Watchmen" where if you can't see the painting in enough detail you can't see the beauty and significance of what is being observed.
I had a friend who told me how when they were growing up they believed the phrase 'once in a lifetime coup' was what they heard, a 'once in a lifetime coo,' meaning something so amazing that the one time it happens everyone goes "ooooh," and "coooo!"
It was me. My friend who won't admit this as an adult. Was me.
A couple more snippets. The UK and US kept the breaking of Enigma very secret for about thirty years... until '73-74. This would have been hard to do as some Polish had been doing work on it too and some of them would have presumably gone back to Poland (I think one might have been extracted to the UK)... anyways the idea was that say the Czechs for Soviets might adopt a re engineered Enigma machine and use it to transmit messages in the Cold war and the US or others could perhaps break them. It sounds as if this was a forlorn hope. The KGB are not stupid at the top level. If they found that post WWII the US /UK were not using Enigma derivatives they'd reach a conclusion - a lot of work needed to be done to make the concept safe. As far as the Venona decripts.. they too had a problem. Because Venona was kept secret because the work was on going (and I guess if the soviets could be forced into reusing One time pads).. .no prosecution could be attempted based solely on Venona information. Ted Hall who passed atomic weapon data to the Soviets and admitted it very late in life went off to the UK , which was a wise move. Venona made it clear to those who needed to know that Ted was involved in moving data but without a confession the US could do nothing. He kept quiet, kept out of the US and also kept out of prison.
UK has taken over the work of the polish guys directly after the fall of Poland. In fact the polish where the one who broke it. We had already even built a special machine for cracking it.
@@rosomak8244 There was a small Polish team working in the sth of France in 43 and 44. Eventually someone in the UK realised if the Germans ever caught them and tortured them they might realise what the UK might be up to. The order went out to send in a Lysander and evacuate them to the UK mainland, just to be sure. I think originally they were left in France as opposed to evacuation via Portugal as the UK did not want one foreign person working at Bletchley park. And that was the rule that was maintained. Not even Americans. TE Fidler NzL
I thought NSA stood for “No Such Agency”
Never Say Anything
Were there any variations of "Point AF" where we could send something believable but not true out & see if they would react, thereby showing that our code was broken?
Bad idea you never let them know that you actually have it for example if there's a huge battle naval or land and you know what's going to happen you make your army and Navy look like they don't know what they're doing so you don't give away that you broke their code you start losing a little bit and then eventually you start winning.
We do that all the time.
Like most amateurs, he talks about cipher machines and system as if they were codes. They're not
Isn’t that Gordon Welshman at 31:31, not Turing? 33:16
Let's not forget WindTalkers ! Their hardly mentioned or spoken about
Informative and funny history trip. Unfortunately very shallow not answering "how did its cryptanalysts crack some of the most complicated codes of the twentieth century".
Apparently everybody was reading axis codes, but what about the contrary?.
Putin went on the record when he first became president that it was never a possibility that war would outbreak between the Soviet Union and the USA. He likened it to two boxers wearing blindfolds sparring in a boxing ring, not landing any blows and the ring having no ropes and each being afraid to fall off.
One thing that we do know about the NSA is that though they have difficulty in cracking some encrypted comms, all they do now is hoover it all up anyway, thinking that one day they will be able to do so. To do this they have the worlds largest server farm in Utah and its managed for them by Google. And as was confirmed by Edward Snowdon, they can and do switch on and off the camera and microphone on your smart phone at will and record everything. He said that anyone who is involved in any kind of sensitive occupation should never possess a smartphone period.
Technik Meister The only thing Snowden confirmed is the fact that there are many suckers who will believe anything.
It’s not managed by Google…
@DeepCode it’s literally the NSA itself
@DeepCode not too weird, there was even a court case about the watersupply to the datacenter. As it was going to be used to cool the equipment like servers. NSA was all over it. Most of these places you can Google!
And they off er a community guidelines here when as far as I'm concerned your breaking community guidelines with inappropriate ads
ERA/Univac Eleven-oh-one.
Irish Intelligence , just broke the Highway Code . Apologies tendered . No offence meant or taken.🙈
Who was the first to brake ENIGMA machine code?
I think a German originated the code and then the Poles got hold of an early enigma machine mostly by accident and reverse engineered it.
marian rejewski about 1929
Budiansky disputes Robert Stinnett's book, Day of Deceit. With respect, I somehow distrust Budiansky. Too much theatrics is a give away. Too much drama.
HAHAHA all of the crowd is older then WW1 LOL
37:28 Unbreakable? With enough brute force I suspect they could be broken but you would get "Mary had a little lamb" along with "Blow up the AF bridge". What is the secret meaning about lambs or a long mustache? Also how long it takes is important. In a battle time is important but in political matters time means never. Ask Mary Queen of Scots or Mr. Zimmermann how some things should found out only in the long term, if not never.
No, for one time pads you can mathematically prove that they are unbreakable. They are difficult/inconvenient to use (correctly) though ...
Gregg Weber , I agree with Karol B below. If you use one time pads and preferably you don't ID the pad page in the message then the messages are unbreakable. An important rider is that the length of the sum One time pad digits has to be at least as great as the sum of the Nbr of digits of the numbers representing the letters of the semi encoded message. eg. you can't use 100 digits worth of random numbers from your pad and then recycle those digits for the rest of the message , with of course the receiving station knowing about that .
as an aside - Enigma did not use one time pads but an analogue thereof. BUT each letter had to go through a sequence of contacts , which kept changing but in a defined way. So the initial settings of the rotors and the mechanical changes after that did not correspond to the randomness of a one time pad.
One time pads use random generated five digit sequences which are added in a non carry addition to the prepared number set. In order to get back to the orig message you need the pad page for the day, use non carry subtraction to get back to the original message number set and then you need to regroup the numerals to get back to the original letter groups. ( Two digits represent one letter but the numbers corresponding to letters were grouped 2, 2, 1 (split mapping)1,2,2 before adding to the five digit sequences from the one time pads.
On top of all that a one time pad system uses a data dictionary so common words are converted to other words, which gives an additional level of encryption . This can get messy . Eg if KGB uses ISLAND to represent Britain. then if someone was going in boat from the UK to the sth pacific . Scientist leaves ISLAND to go to Islands becomes a struggle. (I don't believe case was preserved).
Just to finish off. With a OTP system, you can get repetitions eg EAL might appear twice in a message but that is random repetition . EG USA (which would never be sent as USA) would be added as a dictionary number-word to a different random number five digit sequence (but grouped with another precursor word) so it cannot repeat . Even if USA encoded to EAL the first time it appeared, a second EAL in the message is just random. BTW the messages cabled from USA to Sov Union were always sent as letter groups because Western Union et al charged more money for numeric telegrams, presumably because they required check sums and more resending than ordinary telegrams. (imagine 01100 02200 ..01000... x 60 sets to be sent with a morse key.)
The only way you can break into this stuff is with
copies of Encoded messages from cables or off the radio and
a data dictionary/code books and
photocopies of plain copies of old commercial messages (photographed by FBI in a break in operation in the case of Venona) and
an IBM punch card sorting machine (the messages have to be very accurately keyed onto the punch cards) and
the knowledge that the messages or some of them were encoded with the same page of a one time pad.
If matches between two commercial messages are found and the matches occur in the same point in the message then that fraction of the message can be broken.** The position in the message is important because the key sequence that is added via non carry addition depends on how far through the message you are. www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/img/301278/001/full.jpg shows page eight of a typical Russki I think one time pad. Obviously for long messages you will need to use more than one page. That page allows for 50 x 2.5 characters in an ENGLISH message or 125 characters, with A to Z of the plaintext or dictionary word being mapped into 01 to 26. ** Commercial messages have a common structure eg. COMM ATT NYORK MON 0800 MES NBR 090 OF JULI. to MOSKVA AMTORG RE PURCHASE OF ..... , so they are going to be easier to match. Once you have valid matching of some words you have a toe hold. You'd still have to IBM process weeks and weeks of messages before you saw the results of the Russki stuff up of duplicating pages in one time pads. Eg pages started to repeat at page 21 of the OTP block. The idea is based on the examination of the commercial messages and duplicates , you can start recreating the repeated pages of OTPads that were used to generate them. You still do not know if the radio intercept message was sent encoded using page 08 or 15 of the OTP (however the date it was sent would be a bit of a clue). .. so you have to slave through trying all the possible and incomplete OTP pages you have back calculated to try to extract some sense out of the radio intercept messages. .. a real dog of a job.
Meredith Gardner of the NSA '42-48 ish had a captured soviet code book to help him. This is the data dictionary book for common words , not a copy of any OTPs. Typically these code books were changed at 3-4 month periods by the Germans, possibly less frequently by the Soviets.
There is an article here : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad That shows you can get meaningful but useless words (example given is LATER) out of a possible but incorrect key when used do decode a transmission.
When thinking of unbreakable, you must think of computationally unbreakable. You could theoretically break a 128bit RSA/AES cypher, but with all the computing power in the world, it would possibly require a time period of millions of years or even much longer than that. And even now, some believe 128bit keys are too short - Opting for 256bit, 512bit...
Never heard of "TICON" or "TRICON" or "SPYCON" or whatever; I could not hear the pronunciation with accuracy.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TICOM
@@mdcatdad, Thank you. Good on ya mate. TICOM (Target Intelligence Committee) was a secret Allied project formed in World War II to find and seize German intelligence assets, particularly in the field of cryptology and signals intelligence.[1]
Venona was a US Army and FBI project! How did the NSA get to hijack it?
too many jobs..suspicious....
You remember, World War 2 ? Correct
Another Inappropriate Commercial
If you played this thing for ever it would remove a person's effort if he was dying after finishing all education has to offer ain't I evil
Please do nor wear your phone on your body, in your pockets. The EMW released by it send your cells in a spin - literally! - causing cellular resonance. Carry your phone in a separate man bag but NEVER in your pockets, much less your chest pocket which is near your lymph nodes.
You speak about how Russia makes it so difficult for foreign spying yet America has allowed so much of it in our Country
However great this guy may be, he completely, wretchedly & embarrassingly conflates the accomplishments of William & his wife, Elizabeth(?), who was probably a better & more productive cryptographer than William. Moreover, SHE was the one looking for codes in Shakespeare(?) at River Bank Illinois. Needs to patch up his history. Also left out mention of the guy who “invented” Traffic Analysis.
Fabyan Parkway still is in the Chicago west suburbs. So is the building Riverbanks?. Sort of Art Deco or something.I used to drive by it all the time.
William was hired by' Colonel' Fabyan as a plant expert. Elizabeth was hired to break the Bacon/Shakespeare myth. Elizabeth married William and taught him the art of cryptology. She broke codes (by pencil and paper) for US Coast Guard of the alcohol and drug runners on the East Coast. She broke japanese codes during the war. Her contribution was finally recognized with a plaque at CIA HQ. She was not liked by Edgar Hoover - FBI. She showed him up big time.
There comes a time you become cursed by dimensionality...then you have to shift methods...but you don't know what, and therein is an adventurous, treachorous journey through the mine field of happen stans. Goofballs then find the solution the brainiacs could never consider.
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Joyce go away and 5 I'm sorry I haven't seen help
Amanda wouldn't listen to the story or help me in my massive probleml what hurts most is bitches using a bitch god is helping women with and silence kills us women .so is a women attorney in hell helpful to the only woman god is standing for as one is all
The noisy chess emotionally fade because aluminium splenomegaly sip apropos a pink word. exultant, whole butane
I wonder what this talk's ratio of truth to bullshit is.
Stop lying: Turning didn't break the enigma. It was done by the following team: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski .
As soon as he mentioned "electronic communications" in WWII, I stopped viewing. Electronics didn’t exist until well after WEII.
FDR and Churchill had encripted voice communication in the 1940's. That was very primitative electronics, but still electronic.