When you think of spies you may imagine nifty gadgets, foreign travel and being shaken but not stirred. However, there’s a whole lot of mathematics behind cracking codes and deciphering secret messages too.
Code breaking played a crucial r서울흥신소 ole in both World Wars. The meticulous work at Britain’s Bletchley Park led by Alan Turing broke the German Enigma and Geheimschreiber cipher machines.
Origins
When you think of spies and secret agents, you may imagine nifty gadgets, foreign travel and being shaken but not stirred. What you might not think of is maths, but this is a crucial skill for code breakers. Unraveling the truth behind scrambled messages requires loads of mathematical skills from addition and subtraction to data handling and logical thinking.
The meticulous work of code breakers based at Britain’s Bletchley Park played a key role in winning World War II, revealing the locations of German U-boats and helping to sink enemy supply ships. One of the most famous examples of code breaking involves the Enigma machine, used by German military communications. Enigma was a complex encryption system that required code books and special rotors to decipher each message. The code breakers at Bletchley Park were able to read Enigma messages thanks to the electromechanical Bombe developed by Polish intelligence and later by faster British devices, including Alan Turing’s groundbreaking Colossus. Today, a simple personal computer can crack Enigma encryption in seconds.
The code breakers at Bletchley park included 273 women, mostly members of the Wrens branch of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, who were recruited after being recommended by their superiors or excelling in mathematics at school. They received training at the Government Code and Cipher School, where they learned binary math and how to read machine punch tapes. They were also trained to operate the Colossus machine, which helped decipher the code used on the more sophisticated Lorenz cipher machine.서울흥신소
Techniques
Codebreaking involves solving ciphers by finding out how the original message was scrambled. This involves a lot of linguistic and statistical knowledge as well as good problem-solving skills. It was first used by the ninth-century polymath Al Kindi, who developed a method called frequency analysis (see below) that forms the basis of modern cryptography.
A more recent example of cryptanalysis was during World War II, when the German army encrypted military messages using a rotor machine known as Enigma, making it difficult to intercept and decipher them. This was cracked by the renowned team at Bletchley Park, led by Alan Turing. The code breakers were able to use this information to help win the war and save 14 million lives.
In fact, many of the same techniques that are used in cracking ciphers can also be found in logic puzzles and other types of games and problems. These include conversions between different number systems, recognition of particular alphabets such as the Latin letters or symbols that appear in Morse code and maritime signal flags, and noticing patterns like Fibonacci sequences or the repetition of certain numbers within a sequence.
These same techniques have even been used to decipher some of the furtive brain signals that make up the mysterious language of dreams. And of course, they’re what’s behind the popular two-player strategy game Mastermind, where Player One makes a four-bit pattern out of six possible peg colors, while Player Two has to figure it out in 10 tries or less.
History
Codebreaking became a huge business during World War II. Countless books have been written on the subject, and shelves of them have been filled with the declassified documents detailing Allied triumphs against coded Axis communications, most famously those of Germany’s Enigma machine.
In the US, the Army’s cryptographers (under a code name of OP-20-G) broke into foreign diplomatic establishments and their crypto systems, ranging from stepping switches to enciphering machines like the Purple machine used by Japanese Foreign Ministry officials. A pretextual entry into the home of a Japanese naval attache in 1935 uncovered clicking sounds that suggested a cipher machine was present. Despite the fact that these machines were very difficult to crack, a group of US Navy cryptographers—along with British and Dutch counterparts—broke into several Japanese Navy cipher machines by 1940, including the high-security Purple machine used by diplomatic and military attaches.
The American cryptanalysts were also aided by a series of codebook captures, most notably the Zimmermann Telegram—which convinced the United States to enter the war—and messages from German merchantman ships captured off Norway. The codebreakers at Room 40—as well as those at Bletchley Park in England—used the clues from these documents to crack the Enigma code and read German naval messages. Without their efforts the war would have lasted longer, and 14 million lives might have been lost.
Applications
From hiding secrets in ancient times to spies during wartime, codebreaking is used for all sorts of reasons. It is also a really fun maths activity and can be done in a range of ways. This football-themed substitution cipher resource, for example, allows children to solve sums to figure out the letters needed for each word of a code. And it can help them feel like real spies! ClearanceJobs also speaks to Alisha Jordan, Education Director of the National Cryptologic Foundation to discuss the foundation’s efforts to get young people interested in cybersecurity and codebreaking.