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How a crypto mystery from the Cold War was solved – or was it?

Von / 16. November 2016 / 7 Kommentare / Seite 2 von 2 / Auf einer Seite lesen
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There is one other question I have been asking myself about the Violine for a while: why are the five chambers containing the number pegs not interconnected? Were the pegs devided into groups in order to get random sequences with certain properties? Maybe a reader knows more about this.

Further reading: German cipher machines in World War 2: A complete (?) list

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Kommentare (7)

  1. #1 Thomas
    17. November 2016

    This is obviously a stone age method of creating random additives for one time pad use! But since in 1944/45 the US had broken the machine based random number system GEE (with five rotating number wheels) which was used by the German Foreign Office (https://books.google.de/books?id=lwKuAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT329) after WWII the return to a secure, even if not state of the art technology was reasonable.

  2. #2 Joe
    Berlin
    17. November 2016

    Die Frage die ich hatte nach dem Lesen der Beschreibung in dem Buch: Achtung Spione; hatte:
    Wie kommt der Empfänger der chiffrierten Nachricht zu den Zufallsfolgen?
    Ich Stufe das Gerät als Schlüsselgenerator ein der z. B. genutzt wird um Schlüsseleinstellungen – Initialisierung Vektor – vorzunehmen.

  3. #3 Klaus Schmeh
    17. November 2016

    @Joe:
    >Wie kommt der Empfänger der chiffrierten
    >Nachricht zu den Zufallsfolgen?
    Ich nehme an, jemand musste die Zahlen abschreiben.

  4. #4 BartW.
    18. November 2016

    Doesn’t make any difference to your question, but I don’t see how you get to your first coding result. I’d expect 24485 31809 1847, or 24448 53158 40918 47 if you encode the spaces as well. I cannot explain the ’40’ in your example.

  5. #5 Dirk Rijmenants
    Belgium
    18. November 2016

    Great idea, that violine, and pefectly secure. What a great find! Never saw this before but it’s an ingenious thing. Just shake the thing and let the numbers drop into rows of five digits and you have a standard 150 digits one time pad. Write down and give cupy to sender and receiver. The violine is probably either used to create true random keys on a small scale for real use or as a training tool. Its keys could be used for any one-time pad system, not necessarily in combination with the DEIN STAR table.

    This method is actually perfectly secure, as long as you shake enough. You could compare it to the wartime Soviet OTP production where analysis of actual key sheets showed a distinctive patern of left and right hand alternating to choose each digit. As with the violine, although no true randomness with perfect entropy, cryptanalyse of messages, encrypted with those hand types keys, remained impossible.

    The GEE peudo-random machine Thomas refers to is described in detail in the link below. It’s by the way incomprehensible that the German Foreigh Office used such a simple machine to generate keys for a system that would otherwise have been perfectly secure. Those messages were cracked because the keys were not one-time pads (which is unbreakable!) but in essence a simple stream cipher. Or how to screw up perfect security in the most disasterous way…

    https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/doc/Cryptanalysis_of_GEE.pdf

    By the way, DEIN STAR is a mere text-to-plaincode conversion table (Umsetztabelle or Substitutionstabelle) and absolutely not a manual encryption system. I’m afraid the author of the book made an glitch. Its output is called plaincode to stress/warn that the text is only coded into another plain form and presents no security whatsoever. DEIN STAR is one of the many different mnemonics (like ANREIS, AT ONE SIR or SENORA) for various conversion tables of which the plaincode is always followed by encryption (as you correctly showed in example), not necessarily always one-time pad encryption by addition or subtraction, but also used in conjunction with less secure manual ciphers (transposition/substitution combinations)

    https://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/table.htm

  6. #6 Klaus Schmeh
    18. November 2016

    @BartW.
    I’m afraid you’re right. My encoding is wrong.

  7. #7 Frank Gnegel
    Frankfurt
    21. Dezember 2016

    In our colecvtion we have a printing device for printing sheets with blocks of five numbers. You can see it here:
    https://emp-web-09.zetcom.ch/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=311753&viewType=detailView

    We have been told that it is a “Differenzbildungsgerät” used by the German Abwehr to decipher the codes of British agents. But after reading the article about the GEE random number system I wonder wether the device in our collection may have been used to print the GEE pseudo-random code. What do you think?