QED_jak

7-12-95. NYPaper:


   "U.S. Tells How It Found Soviets Sought A-Bomb: Discloses
   Clues That Led to Code-Breaking."

      The American intelligence establishment today unveiled
      one of its oldest secrets: how a small team of
      codebreakers found the first clues that the Soviet Union
      sought to steal the blueprints for the atomic bomb in
      World War II.  Using just brain power -- no computers,
      no stolen skeleton keys -- the cryptographers slowly
      cracked what was thought to be an unbreakable code. 
      Their work and the fact that they had broken the
      Soviets' seemingly impenetrable cipher, was until today
      one of the most tightly held secrets of the National
      Security Agency, the nation's electronic eavesdropping
      service.  The messages were like a jigsaw puzzle with a
      billion pieces -- all black. They had been double-coded
      by a system called a one-time pad -- a unique random
      code for each message, converting words to numbers in a
      pattern used only once.                        HOO_doo


   [Book review] "What Would Happen if E.T. Actually Called:
   The implications of finding other intelligence in the
   universe." 

      Mr. Davies is a supporter of the program called SETI,
      the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which aims
      radio telescopes at thousands of target star systems to
      try to detect communications from extraterrestrial
      civilizations. He argues that if we do pick up any
      signals, or even if we just determine that there is a
      single microorganism out there that formed independently
      of earthly contamination, this "would drastically alter
      our world view and change our society as profoundly as
      the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions." It would be,
      Mr. Davies writes, nothing less than "the greatest
      scientific discovery of all time."             ETT_eeg


   "AT&T Expected to Buy Stake In an Internet Access Provider

      Cementing its recent link with one of the country's
      largest corporate Internet access providers, the AT&T
      Corporation will spend $8 million to buy a stake in the
      BBN Planet Corporation, according to an executive
      familiar with the company's plans.             BBN_bye



   3x Pad: QED_jak

John Young writes:
>    "U.S. Tells How It Found Soviets Sought A-Bomb: Discloses
>    Clues That Led to Code-Breaking."
> 
>       The American intelligence establishment today unveiled
>       one of its oldest secrets: how a small team of
>       codebreakers found the first clues that the Soviet Union
>       sought to steal the blueprints for the atomic bomb in
>       World War II.  Using just brain power -- no computers,
>       no stolen skeleton keys -- the cryptographers slowly
>       cracked what was thought to be an unbreakable code. 

The reports claimed the spys were using one time pads in some flawed
manner, but did not explain very well what the problem was. Does
anyone out there know?

.pm

> "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com> writes:

> The reports claimed the spys were using one time pads in some flawed
> manner, but did not explain very well what the problem was. Does
> anyone out there know?

The AP story by Rita Beamish says:

   The Venona program translated 2,200 telegrams intercepted mostly from
   1942 to 1945.  They were double encoded with a complex numerical system
   that used a different random pattern for each message, officials said.
   The code would have been impossible to crack had not the volume of
   traffic resulted in the Soviets sloppily repeating some of the
   patterns, said Kahn.

The "repeating some of the patterns" means to me "two time pad".  Lots of
work in general, but doable, unlike the one time pad.

	Jim Gillogly
	Mersday, 19 Afterlithe S.R. 1995, 16:00

On Wed, 12 Jul 1995, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> The reports claimed the spys were using one time pads in some flawed
> manner, but did not explain very well what the problem was. Does
> anyone out there know?

According to Christopher Andrew in "KGB: The Inside Story" the Russians 
started to reuse one time pads near the end of the war due to the sheer 
volume of secret information being sent.  This was discovered by Meredith 
Gardener of the ASA in 1948 and later exploited to crack these messages.

The operation goes under the names of Venona and Bride.  The latter is 
used in Peter Wright's book "The Spycatcher's Encyclopedia of Espionage".

-- Rolf


Rolf.Michelsen@delab.sintef.no               "Nostalgia isn't what it
http://www.delab.sintef.no/~rolfm/            used to be..."

Could it be that they were using the pads more than once?  That's the
simplest flaw I can imagine.

Also:

 > >       one of its oldest secrets: how a small team of
 > >       codebreakers found the first clues that the Soviet Union
 > >       sought to steal the blueprints for the atomic bomb in
 > >       World War II.

Gee, why did it take a squad of codebreakers to come to the conclusion
that the Soviets sought to steal atomic secrets?  I mean, couldn't
they just kinda scratch their heads and decide it was highly unlikely
that the Soviets *wouldn't* do it?  And why would they need to "crack"
the code at all?  Seems like they could do some controlled information
leaks and then do some traffic flow analysis via whatever known
communications channels operatives were believed to use; all they
needed was grounds for suspicion, after all.

I assume there's a lot about this not revealed yet, or not clear from
the brief synopsis above.

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