From msuinfo!agate!ames!pacbell.com!amdahl!netcomsv!netcom.com!grady Sat Oct 23 21:17:33 1993 Newsgroups: sci.crypt Path: msuinfo!agate!ames!pacbell.com!amdahl!netcomsv!netcom.com!grady From: grady@netcom.com (Grady Ward) Subject: Codebreakers review Message-ID: Organization: Moby lexicons X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL8] Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1993 14:30:56 GMT Lines: 87 Codebreakers: The inside story of Bletchley Park Edited by F. H. Hinsley & Alan Stripp Oxford University Press 1993 Codebreakers is a first-hand account of the cryptanalysis accomplished at Bletchley Park during the second World War written by twenty-eight participants. In spite of the passage of fifty years and lack of notes for secrecy's sake, the importance of the work within the lives of the authors makes this a series of compelling social and technical vignettes. The purpose of Codebreakers, according to F. H. Hinsley, is to assess the importance of Ultra (the umbrella term for all high-level codebreaking activities during W.W.II) measured against the overall effort of winning the war. In a sense there never can be a completely satisfactory account of this kind of intelligence work because the need for continuing secrecy for many of the facts surrounding the collection of the material. This secrecy works against presenting a coherent account of the entire process of intelligence assimilation, processing, and dissemination since it encourages participants to think anecdotally and tangentially rather than with a view to creating an integrated view of their role. Despite this historiographic handicap, Codebreakers is a comprehensive account of the continuing process of producing and summarizing axis decrypts, now tempered with the participant's sure knowledge on the final strategic and tactical effect they had on specific battles, including Operation Overlord (Normandy) and by implication, the specific effect of cryptanalysis upon the course of Allied resistance. It has relevance for the student of cryptography in several ways. While none of the effects of a specific decrypt were as dramatic as Kahn's (The Codebreakers, Macmillan) account of the killing of Admiral Yamamoto after his itinerary was revealed through the cryptanalysis of the Japanese Purple, there is enough evidence to infer that Rommel, for example, might very well have succeeded in taking Cairo, or that decrypts were crucial to neutralize the U- boats in the crucial months before the Allied invasion of France. Most of the Bletchley decrypts were of medium to low grade ciphers that served not to pinpoint certain exploitable facts but rather to paint an entire picture of placement, readiness, and direction of the scattered axis forces. While hard to unbraid the specific contribution of this kind of general intelligence to the entire prosecution of the war, the contributors, echoing Kahn or Tuchman (The Zimmermann Telegram, Bantam) have little doubt of the tens of thousands of lives that successful cryptanalysis saved over the past sixty years. This perhaps gives some insight into the NSA and State Department jeremiads over widespread cryptographic empowerment at the ending of their monopoly over secure and practical cryptographic systems. To the student of the Enigma machine or of various medium-grade Japanese or Italian code or table cipher systems, several chapters detail their operation, including a few plates and several diagrams of wiring and relay arrangements explicating the internals of the machine. To the student of how the computing machines were hurriedly first designed to assist in generalizing 'cribs', or plaintext- ciphertext pairs, into recovery of keys (that often changed daily) there are recollections of the trials and mistrials of design and operation of untried technologies under pressure. Even to the student who is interested in securing or interpreting communications in this new world of mechanized and algebraized ciphers the book is useful in providing further checklists in preventing historic sources of weakness and points of practical cryptanalytic leverage in modern systems. Overall the book feels incomplete, as none like it could be given perceived geopolitical necessities, but to the small bookshelf of unclassified cryptanalytic history it is a solid addition. 322 pages with general and cipher index, $24.95 ISBN 0-19-820327-6 comments to: Grady Ward grady@netcom.com -- Grady Ward | compiler of: | "Look!" grady@netcom.com | Moby Words, Hyphenator | -- Madame Sosostris +1 707 826 7715 | Part-of-Speech | 15 E2 AD D3 D1 C6 F3 FC (voice / 24hr FAX) | Pronunciator, Thesaurus | 58 AC F7 3D 4F 01 1E 2F