Encryption Is Foundational to The Future (Part 4 The Reign of the Electro-Mechanical Cyphers)

After the Word War II and during the Cold War, the security in sensitive communications was ruled by Electro-Mechanical Cyphers.

Until the 1950’s the WWII the ECM Mark II was used by the NATO, when it was replaced by machines like the KL-7.

KL-7 was an electro-mechanical rotor-based off-line cipher machine, developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and was introduced in 1952 and served for many years as the main cipher machine of the US and NATO.

It is basically a more advanced version of the German Enigma machine, but the KL-7 has eight rotors, seven of which are moved in a complex irregular stepping pattern.

The machines came in several variations and were used by the US Army, Navy, NATO and Foreign Affairs for many years.

Unfortunately, KL-7 is still a classified item and only few of them have survived. Most machines that are on public display today, have been ‘sanitized’ and all wiring has been removed.

RACE (Rapid Automatic Cryptographic Equipment) is an off-line cipher machine, developed by Standard Telefon og Kabelfabrik A/S (STK) in Norway in the late 1970s, as one of the successors to the ageing KL-7.

RACE was the first high-end cipher machine were the cryptographic algorithms were purely implemented in software.

The algorithms were stored in PROMs and the machine was constructed in such a way that up to five algorithms plus a test-program could be installed, simply by adding banks of PROMs on one of the machine’s circuit boards.

Each algorithm, or PROGRAM as it was called, could be selected from the 6-position PROGRAM SELECTOR at the front panel.

EPSOM is the default program, which is present on all NATO/RACE and US/KL-51 machines. It is compatible with the NATO CEROFF standard. Messages created in this mode are formatted in 5-letter groups according to NATO’s ACP-127 standard, just like on AROFLEX. It is approved for all levels of classification.

DERBY was the Norwegian national CEROFF standard, which is similar to but not compatible with EPSOM. Is was probably only released to the Norwegian Armed Forces and national organisations. It supports two cryptografic keys, each of which provides full message protection, with special features for exclusive messages. It was approved by NATO for all levels of classification.

ASCOT is a special program for man-to-machine and machine-to-man communication. It allows the use of One-Time Pads (OTP) or the interoperable pocket size PACE encryptor at the other end. ASCOT was also released to foreign RACE customers.

EDITA was the so-called EDIT ASSISTENT that was developed to help the operator when preparing a punched message tape for ON-LINE transmission. EDITA was also released to foreign users.

Although the KL-51 was developed during the early 1980s, some units were still in use in the late 2000s. In 2006, the US Navy was developing plans to gradually replace the remaining KL-51 units with a more modern device that could be integrated with the latest complex data networks; a possible candidate for this replacement is the KIV-7.

The M-125, codename Fialka, was an electromechanical wheel-based cipher machine, developed in the USSR and was introduced in 1956 and soon became one of the favorite machines of the Warsaw Pact and some allied nations, such as Cuba.

The machine is similar to the American Sigaba, the KL-7 and the Enigma.

The original M-125 was succeeded by the M-125-3 in the mid-1960s and remained in use until the early 1990s.

At the heart of each Fialka machine is a drum with 10 different electromechanical cipher wheels or rotors, that move in an irregular manner when entering a message. Each wheel has 30 contacts at either side and is identified by a letter of the Russian alphabet.

The M-105, codename: AGAT, was a Russian off-line cipher machine that was developed and built in the USSR in the late 1960s. The machines were used by all countries of the Warsaw Pact and the encryption is due by a built-in key tape mixer that was fed with an 11-level punched paper tape with random data.

The M-105 was succeeded by the fully electronic M-205 D in 1986 but many M-105 machines remained in use until the end of the East-Germany. For communication between the East-Germany Government and Hungary, the M-105 was replaced by the T-353 (Dudek) in 1987.

 

 

Julian Bolivar-Galeno is an Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Architect whose expertise is in telecommunications, security and embedded systems. He works in BolivarTech focused on decision making, leadership, management and execution of projects oriented to develop strong security algorithms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and its applicability to smart solutions at mobile and embedded technologies, always producing resilient and innovative applications.

Encryption Is Foundational to The Future (Part 4 The Reign of the Electro-Mechanical Cyphers)

NeuroBrain, In a Small Introduction to Deep Machine Learning.

You have the curiosity about how the machine learning process really is?

In this video you have a small example how machine learning really looks.

NeuroBrain is a self-structuring and evolutionary Recursive Neural Network (SSERNN) developed by BolivarTech, it has the ability to define it internal topology by itself during the learning process, by aggregating new structures when it is needed in order to learn a knowledge or pattern, and removing the unused ones when are not needed; just like a biological brain.

Also it has the evolutionary support that allow the use of BolivarTech’s evolutionary algorithms implementation, where using the crossing between individuals and mutations through generations of NeuroBrains populations, allow search and find optimal and semi-optimal topologies that can learn in a more efficient way the knowledge; just like occurs in the natural environment as was described by Charles Darwin, where the more adapted to an environment pass it abilities to the next generations.

The use of the innovative Self-Structuring and the Evolutionary algorithms allow to NeuroBrains be a powerful deep machine learning solution.

In the example show in the video, is a population of NeuroBrains and over generations and generations perform TicTacToe match between them in order to learn and find strategies to win the game.

Several match are at the same time, everyone with their own competitors in order to use the CPU multi core support.

 

 

Julian Bolivar-Galeno is an Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Architect whose expertise is in telecommunications, security and embedded systems. He works in BolivarTech focused on decision making, leadership, management and execution of projects oriented to develop strong security algorithms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and its applicability to smart solutions at mobile and embedded technologies, always producing resilient and innovative applications.

NeuroBrain, In a Small Introduction to Deep Machine Learning.

Encryption Is Foundational to The Future (Part 3 The Begin of the Technological Age)

The first world war showed the importance of cryptography on the battlefield, and the danger of weak encryption. The second world war became a defining moment in the history of cryptography and placed it squarely at the center of military and political strategy from that time to the present day.

The Enigma machine was developed by a German Arthur Scherbius in 1918 and was patented in 1919. It was marketed with portability and confidentiality as it sales features, but it had a lack of commercial success. When Germany discovered that they had lost WW I as a result of their cipher having been cracked by the British, despite the high cost, the machine was adopted by the German Navy in 1926, the Army in 1928 and the Air Force in 1935; also it was introduced into service with other sections of the German government.

The Enigma was an Off Line cipher system which was designed to provide high-grade cipher-text from the input of plaintext and the reverse.

The ciphering method used by Enigma is known as a polyalphabetic substitution cipher, and the “key” consists of a combination of gear wheels (rotors), known as “a scrambler”, on each of which 26 letters of the modern alphabet are inscribed, and a mechanism known as the plug-board for performing single character substitutions.

Enigma is used by first setting the scrambler and then typing the plain (unencrypted) text on the keyboard, the ciphered letters, encrypted by the scrambler, are displayed on a lamp board and this letter was transcribed on a message pad. A single scale is rotated by the scrambler each time a character is typed, which means that a different key is used to cipher every single character, the procedure repeated until the message was complete and the cypher-text message was then transmitted by radio using Morse code

Enigma decodes encrypted messages when the same key that was used to prepare the ciphered message is used to decrypt it, and following the same procedure the cipher-text is typed letter by letter and the plaintext equivalent is displayed on the lamp board.

The Enigma was, in terms of its internal architecture, a swapping machine and, as such, two machines with equal configuration would give the same result; for example, “X” to get “C” or “C” to get “X”. This meant that once the “configuration” or “key” was found, all messages using that could be decrypted. There was no internal dynamic update of the key based on the message traffic or any other variable. In addition, keying X would never give X and this latter weakness was used to great effect when applied to known text that provide clues to breaking a cipher-text containing for example expressions such as “Dear Sir”, or “Heil Hitler!”

Japanese Naval Code JN-25 was a secret-key substitution cipher where the cipher-text words appears as a number.

The cipher-text is generated by two other code groups, the first one assigned to the word a constant hard mapping of a unique 5 decimal digit numbers. For example.

 

Code group	Word
41712	Like
64479	You
72084	I
80514	Eat
95280	bananas
39318	apples

 

The Second code group for a word consist of an “additive book” of code groups, determined by an “indicator” in the cipher-text, and added to the word’s own code group by no-carry addition.

For example, the additive group can be.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7
49356	70122	84213	69006	22242	92355	06150

 

To encode the message “I eat apples” and choose the indicator 4 is transformed in follow operation

Message as code groups	72084	80514	39318
Additive groups, from 4	69006	22242	92355
No-carry sums; ciphertext	31080	02756	21663

 

Then the transmitted cipher-message is 4 31080 02756 21663

In order to recover the message only is necessary to calculate the subtraction between the ciphertext and the corresponding additive group.

During World War II, the US Navy developed a cipher machine, the Electronic Code Machine (ECM) Mark II, also known as SIGABA.

The ECM Mark II, had its roots in the “M-134”, a cipher machine designed by William Friedman before the war, and in fact the SIGABA was also known as the “M-134C”.

The original M-134 was conceptually similar to the Enigma in that it used a rotor system to scramble letters, but it differed in that it had five rotors, not three, and in that the rotors advanced in a seemingly random fashion, not in a nice neat progression with each character entered.

The movement of the rotors was controlled by a “paper tape”, which was a long strip of paper with holes punched across its width. In this case, the paper tape would accommodate five holes across its width, with a hole punched mean that the corresponding rotor must to advance, if no hole was punched, the rotor would not advance. Which hole controlled which rotor was determined by a plugboard with five plugs.

Given a long and properly devised paper tape, the sequence of rotor movements could be difficult to reverse-engineer. However, the paper tape produced operational issues, and Frank Rowlett used a separate set of rotors to generate the unpredictable sequence of rotor movements.

Friedman and Rowlett implemented this idea with a device called the M-229, which was connected to the M-134 in place of the paper-tape system.

The M-229 had three rotors of its own and a switch to vary its operation, and its output controlled the movement of the five rotors of the M-134.

Finally, the ECM Mark II used all these improvements and included a total of fifteen rotors. Five of these rotors were normal cipher rotors with 26 connections, and they stepped in an irregular fashion. Five of the rotors were known as “control rotors”, and had 26 contacts like the cipher rotors, while the remaining five rotors, the “index rotors”, had 10 contacts each. These two sets of rotors controlled the stepping sequence of the cipher rotors.

The Soviet archives relating to signals intelligence are closed and information on cryptography is hard to find and verify, both during the Tsarist era and in the Soviet period.

Anatoly Klepov, a professional in the field of communications security has published “Encryptors and Radio Intelligence. Shield and Sword of Information World”, although the book was written for a Russian audience the author has published an interesting summary in English at aklepov.com ; and based on it we know “before the war in 1941 top secret information was encrypted with paper encryption documents” and “What was the way the USSR produced encryption keys before 1941?, They used special devices to generate keys to encryption equipment and one-time pads. The devices resembled modern Bingo game machine. The machine featured two units running punch tape. Balls randomly touched the punch tapes generating balanced gamma – random number sequence that was used to generate encryption key. The strength of such encryption keys was miserable.”

 

 

Julian Bolivar-Galeno is an Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Architect whose expertise is in telecommunications, security and embedded systems. He works in BolivarTech focused on decision making, leadership, management and execution of projects oriented to develop strong security algorithms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and its applicability to smart solutions at mobile and embedded technologies, always producing resilient and innovative applications.

Encryption Is Foundational to The Future (Part 3 The Begin of the Technological Age)