Looking back at Sweden's super-code-cracker
The code-cracking history of World War II, and in particular the Enigma Machine story, are legendary. But a feat of equal or even greater cryptographic virtuosity has been overshadowed by that well-known tale.
Naturally, that's of interest to the hackers and tinkerers at this year's Chaos Communication Camp. Sven Moritz Hallberg reconstructed the events today for the campers here.
In fact, the Germans had several devices used to encode messages. The Enigma device was mobile, easily used by field units. But many important messages were encoded using a bigger, more complicated piece of Siemens and Halske machinery called the T52, or the "Geheimschreiber" (the secret-writer).
Early in the war, while the Russians were invading Finland, and the Germans fighting in Norway, the neutral Swedes naturally wanted information on what was happening around them.
Tapping German lines running through their country to Norway, their cryptology unit was able to to decode most ordinary ciphers. But they found some strings of digits that were, in the words of one frustrated report, "severely unreadable."
