USES OF CRYPTOGRAPHY

Scytale: The scytale transposition cipher was used by the Spartan military. The ancient Greeks and the Spartans in particular, are said to have used this cipher to communicate during military campaigns. In cryptography, a scytale is a tool used to perform a transposition cipher, consisting of a cylinder with a strip of parchment wound around it, on which a message is written. The recipient uses a rod of the same diameter on which he wraps the parchment to read the message. It has the advantage of being fast and not prone to mistakesa necessary property when on the battlefield. It can, however, be easily broken. Since the strip of parchment hints strongly at the method, the ciphertext would have to be transferred to something less suggestive, somewhat reducing the advantage noted. PURPLE: The Japanese Foreign Office used a cipher machine to encrypt its diplomatic messages to secure its high-level communications with Germany. The machine was called PURPLE by U.S. cryptographers; an electro-mechanical stepping switch device. A message was typed into the machine, which enciphered and sent it to an identical machine. The receiving machine could decipher the message only if set to the correct settings, or keys. Decoding was slow and much of the traffic was still hard to break. By the time the traffic was decoded and translated, the contents were often out of date. A reverse-engineered machine created in 1939 by a team of technicians led by William Friedman and Frank Rowlett could figure out some of the PURPLE code by replicating some of the settings of the Japanese Enigma machines. This sped up decoding and the addition of more translators on staff in 1942 made it easier and quicker to decipher the traffic intercepted. JN-25: It was the chief and most secure, command and control communications scheme used by the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during and slightly before World War II. Introduced in 1939, it was an enciphered code, producing five numeral groups in the traffic which was actually broadcast. It was frequently revised during its lifetime, and each new version required a more or less fresh cryptanalytic start. New code books were introduced from time to time and new super enciphering books were also introduced, sometimes simultaneously. In particular, JN-25 was significantly changed on 1 December 1940, and again on 4 December 1941, just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was that edition of the JN-25 system which was sufficiently broken by late May 1942 to provide the forewarning which led to the U.S. victory at the Battle of Midway.

USES OF CRYPTANALYSIS In England in 1587, Cryptanalysis was used by spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham to implicate Mary, Queen of Scots, in the Babington Plot to murder Elizabeth I of England. Queen Mary was tried and eventually executed for treason for her involvement in three plots to assassinate Elizabeth I which was known about because her coded correspondence with fellow conspirators had been deciphered. Zimmermann Telegram: In the history of Cryptanalysis, Room 40 was the section in the Admiralty most identified with the British cryptanalysis effort during World War I. It has been estimated that Room 40 decrypted around 15,000 German communications, the section being provided with copies of all intercepted communications traffic, including wireless and telegraph traffic. Room 40 had previously obtained German cipher documents, including the diplomatic cipher 13040 and naval cipher 0075, retrieved from the wrecked cruiser SMS Magdeburg. However its most important contribution was probably in decrypting the Zimmermann Telegram, a cable from the German Foreign Office sent via Washington to its ambassador Heinrich von Eckardt in Mexico which played a major part in bringing the United States into the war. The Zimmermann Telegram was a 1917 diplomatic proposal from the German Empire to Mexico to make war against the United States. The proposal was intercepted and decoded by British intelligence using previously known German ciphers. Revelation of the contents outraged American public opinion and helped generate support for the United States declaration of war on Germany. Cryptanalysis of the Enigma: Enigma machines belong to the family of electromechanical rotor cipher machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages using polyalphabetic substitution cipher. Enigma was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I, particularly used by Nazi Germany before and during World War II. Western Allies in World War II were able to read substantial amounts of secret Morse-coded radio communications of the Axis powers that had been enciphered using Enigma machines. This yielded military intelligence which, along with that from other decrypted Axis radio and teleprinter transmissions, was given the codename Ultra. Decryption of the Enigma Cipher allowed the Allies to read important parts of German radio traffic on important networks and was an invaluable source of military intelligence throughout the War. Good operating procedures, properly enforced, would have made the cipher unbreakable. However, most of the German armed and secret services and civilian agencies that used Enigma, employed poor procedures and it was these that allowed the cipher to be broken.