The World's Perspective

            At first, I just wanted to know about codes in general. So, one lazy afternoon I find myself sitting at my computer, and decide to do a bit of the research on them. I go to www.aclibrary.org, and navigate myself to "Infotrack", and type in cryptography. I look at some of the articles, and the first ones have some interest to me, but they mostly refer to modern-day security instead of actual cryptography. Then I ask myself: "This is getting you nowhere. What would be easy and interesting information to learn instead of this junk?" Suddenly, the link on my browser to Google seems to jump out at me like something from an Imax theater. Over to Google I go. As I look at the blank search box I decide to search for "World War II cryptography" because World War II had lots of interesting cryptography events. I click the first link, and I knew that this is the right way to go.

            As soon as the page loads, I see masses of links to helpful information. I resist the temptation to go straight to a page and absorb the information, and I calmly scroll down to the bottom of the page looking for some kind of authentic mark about the page so I know its not all bogus. At the very bottom, it says loudly and proudly that the website was made by Tony Sale, founder of the Bletchley Park Museum (with an email address), and Andrew Hodges, biographer of Alan Turing (Alan Turing broke the Enigma).

            I tried to narrow down the topics by looking for something that I was familiar with, but wanted to learn more about, and the word Enigma couldn't have been more noticeable if it had screamed. Click. It brings me to a page that has links to many other pages, and 3 of them are isolated. These three links are isolated because they form a sort of guide to the Enigma machine and code. This is where I want to go. When I clicked on the first one, a gate of learning opened up, and somewhere in cyberspace, information was in my fingertips.

            The first, and most simple, ciphering system ever used, was one where the letters in the alphabet were just shifted over. Here is an example of what one key might look like.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFG
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
            This type of code was known as the Caesar's Cipher, and it only had 25 possible substitution keys (the one not included, is where it encrypts into the original text). The different keys would be: scoot the alphabet over one, scoot the alphabet over two, etc. To encrypt a text, first, you would create a table like the one above, and then you would have to substitute each letter in the text with the one below it. To decrypt, you would have to know how many spaces to scoot over, then create a table much like the one above, and finally substitute each letter with the one above it.

            The next type of substitution ciphers used was one where the lower alphabet (the key) was random.
Here is an example:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
IPHBOSFCQZJNTWGLMYRXDKEUVA
            This kind of encryption required the receiver to know the key before receiving, which creates a problem, because if someone had a clear channel (a way of transmitting something in a way that couldn't be intercepted), they would have no need to encrypt anything. Using this coding system, there are 403,291,461,126,605,635,584,000,000 different key possibilities. While this is a large number, security doesn't always lie in numbers. If the same key was used for each message, one could use simple code breaking methods, such as: "e" is the most common letter, and "the" is the most common word.

            In World War II, a method of coding called the "one-time pad" was created. To create a key for this type of encryption, a person, usually a secretary would be paid to pick random letters, often using a deck of cards, a bingo machine, or dice, and print those letters onto carbon paper to create two copies. One of the copies was given to an officer before going on a mission or going away. The second copy was given to the person who would be receiving the message. To encrypt a message using a one-time pad, one would put the letters of it below the letters of the message, separating the words every 5 letters and ignoring spaces like so: HELLO IMUST HEARY ES
APTGP KWNFK ABFPE QP
Then, you add together the letters, with each letter having its value as a number (a=1, b=2, c=3, etc.), subtracting 26 when it goes over 25. Doing this, we encode Hello I must hear yes.
Initial text - HELLO IMUST HEARY ES
One time pad- APTGP KWNFK ABFPE QP
Encrypted txt- IUGSF WI…………. And so forth
These one-time pads, if chosen completely randomly, were impossible to break. Sometimes though, the person making the pads got sloppy, and had urges to pick common letters, steer away from less common ones, and not have the same letter twice in a row.

            Now, the Enigma. In a jiffy, the Enigma was a machine that encoded in a certain pattern, using what seemed like a different substitution key for each character. It achieved this by using three or four wheels, each with the alphabet on the outer edge, and each letter on the edge was able to conduct electricity. Each of these wheels contained its own substitution key, and the operator of the Enigma machine could change this key. When the operator entered in a letter to the keyboard on an Enigma machine, an electric current flowed through the appropriate letter on the outside of the wheel, then outputted at the correct place for its substitution cipher. Then, the current went from the letter on one terminal to that same letter on the other, where it was passed through that wheel, sent onto the third, passed through that wheel, and then reflected back through its path to be encoded more (the electric current was sent back so that the Enigma machine didn't have to be set up for encoding or decoding, but it could just have one setting all the time).

            If the Enigma machine's wheels didn't move, the enigma would just have been a complicated way of using a simple substitution cipher. But this is not the case. Each time the operator entered in a letter, the first wheel turned, making it have different connections with the next wheel. The second and third wheels turned when their set turning points were reached.

            Finally, the electric current flowed back through the wheels, and even though the operator wasn't typing, the Enigma machine was set up so that the wheels still moved. This was done so that the Enigma machine didn't have to be set up as either decrypting, or encrypting, instead it would be able to do both by simply entering in a message to be encrypted or decrypted into the keyboard.

            In the I-search, I think I'm learning a lot about what I want to be learning, but also some information that doesn't interest me at all. In the beginning of the I-search, I had a brief idea about the Enigma, but I didn't know that it was so well thought out, or so complex. All the information I learnt about the Enigma, and the codes before it came from two websites, and a book. I found that the Internet was most useful for finding specific information, and the book, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, was useful for getting me into this topic, and for providing light facts.

            Overall, I have enjoyed my Media Search, but there have been times when I found it boring, or frustrating. One of these times, was when I was using sources like Infotrack, and I couldn't find good, solid information, just loose facts. Another hard part was trying to find internet pictures, or copies, of actual articles from the Second World War, because it would have been interesting to find out about what media cryptography was getting then. Finally, I gave up and just looked at websites that explained the thing I most wanted to know about: the Enigma. From my searching, I found great amounts of information that proved useful and exiting at the same time. In conclusion, I had a fun time learning the information that I needed for my media search, and was fascinated when I tried to put it all together.