Cryptology's Role in the Early Development of Computer
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
To What Extent Did British Advancements in Cryptanalysis During World War II Influence the Development of Computer Technology?
Portland State University PDXScholar Young Historians Conference Young Historians Conference 2016 Apr 28th, 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM To What Extent Did British Advancements in Cryptanalysis During World War II Influence the Development of Computer Technology? Hayley A. LeBlanc Sunset High School Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/younghistorians Part of the European History Commons, and the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y LeBlanc, Hayley A., "To What Extent Did British Advancements in Cryptanalysis During World War II Influence the Development of Computer Technology?" (2016). Young Historians Conference. 1. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/younghistorians/2016/oralpres/1 This Event is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Young Historians Conference by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. To what extent did British advancements in cryptanalysis during World War 2 influence the development of computer technology? Hayley LeBlanc 1936 words 1 Table of Contents Section A: Plan of Investigation…………………………………………………………………..3 Section B: Summary of Evidence………………………………………………………………....4 Section C: Evaluation of Sources…………………………………………………………………6 Section D: Analysis………………………………………………………………………………..7 Section E: Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………10 Section F: List of Sources………………………………………………………………………..11 Appendix A: Explanation of the Enigma Machine……………………………………….……...13 Appendix B: Glossary of Cryptology Terms.…………………………………………………....16 2 Section A: Plan of Investigation This investigation will focus on the advancements made in the field of computing by British codebreakers working on German ciphers during World War 2 (19391945). -
Theeccentric Engineer by Justin Pollard
106 TIME OUT COLUMNIST The name of Tommy Flowers deserves to be as well known as the computing industry giants who profited from his wartime efforts. TheEccentric Engineer by Justin Pollard PEOPLE Competition purpose machine, it was the first electronic computer. THE FORGOTTEN What are these Bletchley The device set to work on Park Wrens thinking as they Tunny intercepts. It also gained ENGINEER OF work on Colossus? The best a new name, thought up by BLETCHLEY PARK caption emailed to the members of the Women’s [email protected] by Royal Naval who operated the 23 March wins a pair of one-tonne, room-sized behemoth books from Haynes. – Colossus. A 2,400-valve version entered service four days before D-Day, providing crucial decrypts of Tunny messages in the lead-up to the invasion. It’s said system offering five trillion that Eisenhower had a Tunny times more combinations decrypt, courtesy of Colossus, than the 157 trillion offered in his hand as he gave the order by Enigma. The possibility to launch Operation Overlord. of getting bombes to crunch By the end of the war there that many permutations fast were ten Colossus machines at enough for the intelligence to Bletchley. After the surrender of have any value seemed remote. Germany, eight of them were The man charged with solving destroyed and the other two this conundrum was Max secretly moved to the peacetime Newman, whose ‘Hut F’ team was government intelligence centre, assigned the task of cracking the GCHQ, where one remained in ‘Tunny’ intercepts known to operation until 1960. -
SPYCATCHER by PETER WRIGHT with Paul Greengrass WILLIAM
SPYCATCHER by PETER WRIGHT with Paul Greengrass WILLIAM HEINEMANN: AUSTRALIA First published in 1987 by HEINEMANN PUBLISHERS AUSTRALIA (A division of Octopus Publishing Group/Australia Pty Ltd) 85 Abinger Street, Richmond, Victoria, 3121. Copyright (c) 1987 by Peter Wright ISBN 0-85561-166-9 All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. TO MY WIFE LOIS Prologue For years I had wondered what the last day would be like. In January 1976 after two decades in the top echelons of the British Security Service, MI5, it was time to rejoin the real world. I emerged for the final time from Euston Road tube station. The winter sun shone brightly as I made my way down Gower Street toward Trafalgar Square. Fifty yards on I turned into the unmarked entrance to an anonymous office block. Tucked between an art college and a hospital stood the unlikely headquarters of British Counterespionage. I showed my pass to the policeman standing discreetly in the reception alcove and took one of the specially programmed lifts which carry senior officers to the sixth-floor inner sanctum. I walked silently down the corridor to my room next to the Director-General's suite. The offices were quiet. Far below I could hear the rumble of tube trains carrying commuters to the West End. I unlocked my door. In front of me stood the essential tools of the intelligence officer’s trade - a desk, two telephones, one scrambled for outside calls, and to one side a large green metal safe with an oversized combination lock on the front. -
Early Stored Program Computers
Stored Program Computers Thomas J. Bergin Computing History Museum American University 7/9/2012 1 Early Thoughts about Stored Programming • January 1944 Moore School team thinks of better ways to do things; leverages delay line memories from War research • September 1944 John von Neumann visits project – Goldstine’s meeting at Aberdeen Train Station • October 1944 Army extends the ENIAC contract research on EDVAC stored-program concept • Spring 1945 ENIAC working well • June 1945 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC 7/9/2012 2 First Draft Report (June 1945) • John von Neumann prepares (?) a report on the EDVAC which identifies how the machine could be programmed (unfinished very rough draft) – academic: publish for the good of science – engineers: patents, patents, patents • von Neumann never repudiates the myth that he wrote it; most members of the ENIAC team contribute ideas; Goldstine note about “bashing” summer7/9/2012 letters together 3 • 1.0 Definitions – The considerations which follow deal with the structure of a very high speed automatic digital computing system, and in particular with its logical control…. – The instructions which govern this operation must be given to the device in absolutely exhaustive detail. They include all numerical information which is required to solve the problem…. – Once these instructions are given to the device, it must be be able to carry them out completely and without any need for further intelligent human intervention…. • 2.0 Main Subdivision of the System – First: since the device is a computor, it will have to perform the elementary operations of arithmetics…. – Second: the logical control of the device is the proper sequencing of its operations (by…a control organ. -
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombe: Machine Research and Development and Bletchley Park
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by CURVE/open How I learned to stop worrying and love the Bombe: Machine Research and Development and Bletchley Park Smith, C Author post-print (accepted) deposited by Coventry University’s Repository Original citation & hyperlink: Smith, C 2014, 'How I learned to stop worrying and love the Bombe: Machine Research and Development and Bletchley Park' History of Science, vol 52, no. 2, pp. 200-222 https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0073275314529861 DOI 10.1177/0073275314529861 ISSN 0073-2753 ESSN 1753-8564 Publisher: Sage Publications Copyright © and Moral Rights are retained by the author(s) and/ or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This item cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. This document is the author’s post-print version, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer-review process. Some differences between the published version and this version may remain and you are advised to consult the published version if you wish to cite from it. Mechanising the Information War – Machine Research and Development and Bletchley Park Christopher Smith Abstract The Bombe machine was a key device in the cryptanalysis of the ciphers created by the machine system widely employed by the Axis powers during the Second World War – Enigma. -
VISIT to BLETCHLEY PARK
REPORT of STAR GROUP – VISIT to BLETCHLEY PARK It was 8-30 on the damp drizzly Monday morning of 5th October when our intrepid group of bleary-eyed third-agers left Keyworth to visit the former codebreaking and cipher centre at Bletchley Park. As we progressed south along the M1 motorway the weather started to clear and by the time we arrived in Milton Keynes the rain and drizzle had stopped. For me the first stop was a cup of coffee in the Block C Visitor Centre. We moved out of the Visitor Centre and towards the lake. We were told that many a wartime romantic coupling around this beautiful lake had led to marriage. The beautiful Bletchley Park Lake So… Moving on. We visited the Mansion House with it’s curious variety of styles of architecture. The original owners of the estate had travelled abroad extensively and each time they returned home they added an extension in the styles that they visited on their travels. The Mansion House At the Mansion we saw the sets that had been designed for the Film “The Imitation Game.” The attention to detail led one to feel that you were back there in the dark days of WWII. History of The Mansion Captain Ridley's Shooting Party The arrival of ‘Captain Ridley's Shooting Party’ at a mansion house in the Buckinghamshire countryside in late August 1938 was to set the scene for one of the most remarkable stories of World War Two. They had an air of friends enjoying a relaxed weekend together at a country house. -
Cryptography in a Quantum World
Cryptography in a Quantum World ⋆ Gilles Brassard 1,2 1 D´epartement d’informatique et de recherche op´erationnelle Universit´ede Montr´eal, C.P. 6128, Succursale Centre-ville Montr´eal (QC), H3C 3J7 Canada 2 Canadian Institute for Advanced Research [email protected] http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~brassard/en/ Abstract. Although practised as an art and science for ages, cryptog- raphy had to wait until the mid-twentieth century before Claude Shannon gave it a strong mathematical foundation. However, Shannon’s approach was rooted is his own information theory, itself inspired by the classical physics of Newton and Einstein. But our world is ruled by the laws of quantum mechanics. When quantum-mechanical phenomena are taken into account, new vistas open up both for codemakers and codebreakers. Is quantum mechanics a blessing or a curse for the protection of privacy? As we shall see, the jury is still out! Keywords: Cryptography, Quantum mechanics, Quantum computa- tion, Post-quantum cryptography, Quantum communication, Quantum key distribution, Edgar Allan Poe 1 Introduction For thousands of years, cryptography has been an ongoing battle between code- makers and codebreakers [1,2], who are more formally called cryptographers and cryptanalysts. Naturally, good and evil are subjective terms to designate code- makers and codebreakers. As a passionate advocate for the right to privacy, my allegiance is clearly on the side of codemakers. I admit that I laughed hyster- ically when I saw the Zona Vigilada warning that awaits visitors of the Pla¸ca de George Orwell near City Hall in Barcelona [3]. Nevertheless, I recognize that codebreakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War were definitely on the side of good. -
War Machines: Women's Computing Work and the Underpinnings of the Data-Driven State, 1930-1946
Programmed Inequality How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing Marie Hicks HD 6135 H53 2017 The Library Mt. St. Vincent Univ. Halifax, N.S. B3M 2J6 The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 1 War Machines: Women's Computing Work and the Underpinnings of the Data-Driven State, 1930-1946 In recent years, the restoration of Bletchley Park has attracted worldwide attention. The country estate in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, was the site of the most important codebreaking operations of World War II and home to the first digital, electronic, programmable computer: the Colossus. The British-designed and manufactured Colossus computers, of which there were ten in all by war's end, were critical to the conduct of Allied wartime operations. Unlike their better-known U.S. counter part, the ENIAC, the Colossus computers were actually deployed during the war, actively changing its outcome. Kept secret for decades, the full import of the developments at Bletchley has only recently become widely known.1 Yet while popular culture has begun to recognize the importance of Bletchley's wartime operations, misunderstandings persist about the nature of the information work performed there. The 2014 blockbuster The Imitation Game, for instance, cleaves the Colossus computers from the narrative entirely in favor of building a "great man" narrative for a single codebreaker.2 Hidden within the story of Bletchley is a less popular narrative that cannot leverage the appeal of a lone genius and his accomplishments. Thousands of women worked at Bletchley during the war-most in tech nical roles.3 Although it is generally accepted that the striking and wide ranging roles of the mostly women workers within Bletchley Park give lie to stereotypes about computing as a traditionally masculine field, the contributions of these women have not been analyzed as constitutive of larger trends in the history of computing. -
Musings RIK FARROWOPINION
Musings RIK FARROWOPINION Rik is the editor of ;login:. While preparing this issue of ;login:, I found myself falling down a rabbit hole, like [email protected] Alice in Wonderland . And when I hit bottom, all I could do was look around and puzzle about what I discovered there . My adventures started with a casual com- ment, made by an ex-Cray Research employee, about the design of current super- computers . He told me that today’s supercomputers cannot perform some of the tasks that they are designed for, and used weather forecasting as his example . I was stunned . Could this be true? Or was I just being dragged down some fictional rabbit hole? I decided to learn more about supercomputer history . Supercomputers It is humbling to learn about the early history of computer design . Things we take for granted, such as pipelining instructions and vector processing, were impor- tant inventions in the 1970s . The first supercomputers were built from discrete components—that is, transistors soldered to circuit boards—and had clock speeds in the tens of nanoseconds . To put that in real terms, the Control Data Corpora- tion’s (CDC) 7600 had a clock cycle of 27 .5 ns, or in today’s terms, 36 4. MHz . This was CDC’s second supercomputer (the 6600 was first), but included instruction pipelining, an invention of Seymour Cray . The CDC 7600 peaked at 36 MFLOPS, but generally got 10 MFLOPS with carefully tuned code . The other cool thing about the CDC 7600 was that it broke down at least once a day . -
The First Americans the 1941 US Codebreaking Mission to Bletchley Park
United States Cryptologic History The First Americans The 1941 US Codebreaking Mission to Bletchley Park Special series | Volume 12 | 2016 Center for Cryptologic History David J. Sherman is Associate Director for Policy and Records at the National Security Agency. A graduate of Duke University, he holds a doctorate in Slavic Studies from Cornell University, where he taught for three years. He also is a graduate of the CAPSTONE General/Flag Officer Course at the National Defense University, the Intelligence Community Senior Leadership Program, and the Alexander S. Pushkin Institute of the Russian Language in Moscow. He has served as Associate Dean for Academic Programs at the National War College and while there taught courses on strategy, inter- national relations, and intelligence. Among his other government assignments include ones as NSA’s representative to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council, and on the staff of the National Economic Council. This publication presents a historical perspective for informational and educational purposes, is the result of independent research, and does not necessarily reflect a position of NSA/CSS or any other US government entity. This publication is distributed free by the National Security Agency. If you would like additional copies, please email [email protected] or write to: Center for Cryptologic History National Security Agency 9800 Savage Road, Suite 6886 Fort George G. Meade, MD 20755 Cover: (Top) Navy Department building, with Washington Monument in center distance, 1918 or 1919; (bottom) Bletchley Park mansion, headquarters of UK codebreaking, 1939 UNITED STATES CRYPTOLOGIC HISTORY The First Americans The 1941 US Codebreaking Mission to Bletchley Park David Sherman National Security Agency Center for Cryptologic History 2016 Second Printing Contents Foreword ................................................................................ -
June 1St Heath Robinson Operational
similar vein to Rube Goldberg in The Mark 2 supported the US). conditional branching, just as Charles Babbage’s analytical June 1st The machine consisted of a engine had done [Dec 23], frame (called the bedspread) although there’s no evidence to which supported two long suggest that the Mark 2's Heath Robinson teleprinter paper tapes on a designer, Tommy Flowers [Dec network of reels, and two other 22], was aware of Babbage's Operational racks holding counters and logic design. June 1, 1943 circuits. Ten Colossi were operating by One tape could hold 2,000 The "Heath Robinson" was a the end of the war and an characters of cipher text, while code-breaking machine used at eleventh had been the other stored patterns that Bletchley Park [Aug 15] to help commissioned. They allowed the the codebreakers believed might decrypt the Lorenz (aka Tunny) Allies to extract a vast amount of represent the Lorenz cipher. intelligence from intercepted encryption. The second tape had radio messages sent from Lorenz was a much more to be precisely one character German High Command advanced cipher than the better longer than the first, and throughout Europe. known Enigma [Feb 23]. For keeping the tapes synchronized example, Enigma machines was a major challenge. A functioning reconstruction of a initially used just three rotors Mark 2 was completed in 2008 Max Newman [Feb 7] was during their encryption process, by Tony Sale and volunteers; it's while a Lorenz device employed responsible for the Robinson's on display at The National functional specification, but twelve. -
Annual Report to the Congress: January 1 to September 30, 1983
Annual Report to the Congress: January 1 to September 30, 1983 March 1984 Contents Section Page I. Statements by the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Board, TAAC Chairman, and the Director of OTA. 1 II. Year in Review . 5 III, Work in Progress . 21 IV. Organization and Operations . 23 Appendixes A. List of Advisors and Panel Members . 33 B. OTA Act–Public Law 92-484 . 68 Section I.-Statements by the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Board, TAAC Chairman, and the Director of OTA CHAIRMAN’S STATEMENT- CONGRESSMAN MORRIS K. UDALL The year 1983 was very productive for the Office of Technology Assessment. OTA made substantive contributions to about 60 different committees and subcommittees. They ranged from major, comprehen- sive reports to testimony and special analyses, Considering the com- plex and controversial nature of the issues OTA must deal with, it is commendable that its work continues to be given uniformly high marks for quality, fairness, and usefulness. During 1983, OTA was active in such diverse areas as hazardous and nuclear waste management, acid rain analyses, cost containment of health care, technology and trade policy, Love Canal, wood use, and polygraphs. The evidence of testimony, briefings, other requests for assistance, as well as reception of OTA’s products by committees em- phasizes the contribution made by OTA to the legislative process. 2 ● Annual Report to the Congress for 1983 VICE CHAIRMAN’S STATEMENT- SENATOR TED STEVENS The lives of our citizens and the issues of government have increas- ingly been influenced by science and technology. Congressional com- mittees and Members are drawn into the complexity of science and the controversies involving technology as they face the necessary deci- sions of government.