U.S. Army Guide to Code Breaking 249
sebFlyte writes "From the introduction of this document, the U.S. Army's field manual guide to Cryptanalysis: 'This manual presents the basic principles and techniques of cryptanalysts and their relation to cryptography. Cryptanalytics is the art and science of solving unknown codes and ciphers.'"
call stephenson (Score:5, Funny)
doesn't matter (Score:2, Funny)
Wait... Military intelligence?!?
Yes, however... (Score:5, Funny)
...you know what they say about "military intelligence".
Private
Sergeant
Re:Yes, however... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yes, however... (Score:2)
iah hsmihjjl emyy waay baoh ujauyj, pnh baij yavuyjg onpohmhnhmal vmusjio mo pjdalt hsj ijcvs aw baoh oycostahhjio. hsj cibd bclncy mo a zaat uycvj ha zjh ohcihjt.
Re:Yes, however... (Score:3, Funny)
iah hsmihjjl emyy waay baoh ujauyj, pnh baij yavuyjg onpohmhnhmal vmusjio mo pjdalt hsj ijcvs aw baoh oycostahhjio. hsj cibd bclncy mo a zaat uycvj ha zjh ohcihjt
I really hate typos.
Re:Yes, however... (Score:2)
Re:Yes, however... (Score:5, Funny)
Whose weapons? (Score:3, Funny)
Does anyone else find it funny that the army includes a table of the probability of english letters, i.e. di-and trigraphs in the document? What are they planning on, war with the British
Re:Yes, however... (Score:2, Funny)
And yet another reason why ROT13 is inferior to double ROT13: inconvenience.
US Army Guide to Encryption (Score:2)
Kill eve.
Re:Yes, however... (Score:4, Funny)
Sargeant: "histay siay aay ecretay essagemay"? Yes, private. Consult the manual. Obviously this is beyond our capabilities.
Re:Yes, however... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes, however...Mr. Gates (Score:2, Redundant)
Or the doodlings of a computer software billionaire. [slashdot.org]
Re:Yes, however... (Score:2, Funny)
Light reading (Score:5, Funny)
Solution of polygraphic substitution systems polyalphabetic substitution systems
and that's just the title. Pack a lunch for this one...
Re:Light reading (Score:4, Informative)
A good read along with this would probably be Between Silk And Cyanide: A Codemakers War, which gets into, among other things, creation of more secure codes during WW II. An excellent read (I currenly have The White Rabbit on order (story of Yeo-Thomas' activities in France, capture, interrogation and imprisonment))
Re:Light reading (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Light reading (Score:2, Informative)
Was, sadly. He died about 2 years ago.
His book is very much worth reading, IMAO.
Paul
Re:Light reading (Score:2)
Re:Light reading (Score:2, Informative)
It's not terribly detailed by way of 'how to', but the history of cryptography/cryptanalysis it offers is fantastic. It's also pretty well known for the contest in the back of it, wherein Mr. Singh offers a reward for the solution to all 10 of the codes (I believe a Swedish team eventually won the prize, shortly after the deadline had p
Let's set them loose (Score:3, Funny)
Page 2 reads... (Score:4, Interesting)
ok that was in jest. But seriously, how much good is a field manual going to do you when its possible for handheld computers to encrypt data to such a strong degree that it's theoretically impossible to decrypt with any likelihood of success that's indistinguishable from zero in the lifetime of the universe?
I mean even if the guys at the NSA use different theories from the rest of us, I can only imagine that the methods they use still require vast amounts of hardware...
Re:Page 2 reads... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Page 2 reads... (Score:2, Interesting)
You can bet key military communications were well encrypted at this point, including those coming from the front lines.
Re:Page 2 reads... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Page 2 reads... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can attest that your assertion is exactly right. I was a Signal Intelligence Analyst in the US Army from '87 to '91, and most of what we saw was pretty crude. Remember, the Army doesn't generally intercept diplomatic comm's encrypted with sophisticated devices locked in embassy basements. It's probably more sophisticated now, but back then we mostly got stuff encoded by drafted soldiers and sent via morse code! I was trained in basic cryptanalysis, but most of what we saw was (Soviet) Red Army code table stuff. Morse transmissions would come in as a bunch of 3-digit numbers. The first two digits correspond to the X and Y axes of a 10x10 grid. Each square in the grid would contain 3 to 9 numbered code "snippets", and the 3rd digit of the 3-digit number refers to which. These snippets could be anything-- "weather report", "infantry", "battalion", "heading", a single number, a single letter, etc-- that might make up part of a message. Codes like this are tough to break when used properly, but of course they weren't. Some red army private would send "225 171", and the guy on the other end would say "huh? say again?" because he was holding his code table upsode down or something. They'd go back and forth five or six times before the first guy would just lose his shit and say "GIVE ME A BALLISTIC WEATHER REPORT, YOU STUPID TARD!" and then we'd know that "225 171" meant "REQUEST" and "BWX(ballistic weather report)".
But at about the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, all that started to change. The russkies were gone, and most of the "warsaw pact interoperability" tendency for all their client states disappeared with 'em. A prime example of a military with excellent COMSEC was the Iraqi army, and they did it very simply as well. Instead of using radio, they ran wire and used field telephones for nearly EVERYTHING. When we were deployed for DESERT SHIELD we found the airwaves almost dead. The days of morse code and ciphers are pretty much gone.
Re:Page 2 reads... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you ask for the BWX every morning in your third transmission, your COMSEC is shot to hell no matter how often to change the cods.
Wait, where does the fish come in, exactly? (Score:2)
Please explain to me again how a fish can be used to secure communications?
Re:Wait, where does the fish come in, exactly? (Score:2)
Re:Page 2 reads... (Score:2)
Re:Page 2 reads... (Score:2, Interesting)
http://elonka.com/kryptos/
Elonka gave an interesting talk about cryptography at Defcon this past year. Nowadays, to me anyway, it seems as though cryptography-by-hand is more of an intellectual challenge; rather than something you would ACTUALLY attempt on something like a 4096 bit PGP encrypted o-mi-god problem.
Re:Page 2 reads... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Page 2 reads... (Score:3, Insightful)
What you do is keylog (Score:3, Interesting)
Depending on the situation, you could also throw lots of bogus messages (ie: undecryptable) messages into the mix, leading the users to believe the system buggy (and thus ditch it).
That's more social engineering than crypto, but the point is to break the message. If they stop using the channel, then you hopefully have moved them to a weaker channel.
One-dimensional thinking is good, bu
This is still useful today (Score:2, Interesting)
But in a place like Iraq, where power is unreliable and an endless supply of batteries for handhelds is not available, the enemy will have to rely on non-electronic cipher equipment.
Of course the problem in Iraq is that they don't use the English alphabet or language. The frequency analysis we depend on for the shift cipher or
Re:This is still useful today (Score:2)
The techniques still work. You just have to use a different set of language statistics. You don't even have to understand the language, although it helps. There are precomputed lists of letter frequencies, initial and final letters, digraphs, trigraphs, etc. for all common languages.
Re:Page 2 reads... (Score:2)
That only applies if you're taking a brute force approach to cracking it - something that should be the absolute last resort.
Far more often, the code is broken by exploiting some mathematical weakness in the algorithm (or bug in the software implementation). If that's your aim, then it obviously pays to have a thorough understanding of the field, the various cyphers that have been devised, and how they've been broken in the pa
Re:Page 2 reads... (Score:2)
Because voice messages and on-the-fly manual encryption still exist. I've only been out of the U.S. Army for a few years, but we all learned (in my field, anyway) manual coding techniques, because you
Re:China & Encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
It's an amusing conceit the many Americans have that the rest of the world is utterly incapable of figuring anything out on their own and must steal it from the USA.
Re:China & Encryption (Score:2)
Re:China & Encryption (Score:2)
While Ford's model T was certainly the first affordable auto, European models predate the Model-T by as much as 60 years. [source [wikipedia.org]]
Re:China & Encryption (Score:2)
Right, because the Germans invented DES which started the rush of crypto algorithms while IBM (an American company) was still using polyalphabetic substitution cipers. No, wait, it's the other way around, stupid ass. You're not only wrong, but stupid.
One thing Capitalism does very well is foster innovation, both in invention and improvement of other inventions. We didn't invent the rocket, but we made it better. We invented the atomic bomb. We made serious cryptography.
Partly true.
http://www.sch [schneier.com]
Re:China & Encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
It is 15 years old.
Most of what is described is encryption/decryption that can be done by hand.
It's a FIELD manual.
Re:Page 2 reads... (Score:4, Informative)
If it's too hard to use, no one uses a system.
US Army Guide to Everything. (Score:5, Funny)
If it doesn't move, pick it up.
If you can't pick it up, paint it.
How to defeat a soldier following that algorithm (Score:2)
-Moving and static.
-I can pick it up but I can't.
-And paint won't stick!
Oh, the humanity!
Re:US Army Guide to Everything. (Score:4, Funny)
If it yells when you try to paint it, salute it.
Re:USMC Guide to Everything. (Score:2, Funny)
If it doesn't move, it's not your problem. Let the army deal with it...
If your interested in this.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:If your interested in this.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:If your interested in this.... (Score:2)
Re:If your interested in this.... (Score:2)
Re:If your interested in this.... (Score:2)
Utility? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Utility? (Score:5, Informative)
(P.S. - note that the link they used for "here" doesn't even work.
Re:Utility? (Score:3, Informative)
Back when I was doing SigInt for a living in the late 80s, we used all kinds of stuff like burst transmission, line of sight radio relays, and encryption computers. At the same time, the Russians and Czech units we were listening to were using fairly basic cyphers up to batallion and even brigade level. The one I remember most were fairly simple extensions of Polybios squares that encrypted pa
Re:Utility? (Score:2)
www.atsc-army.org/...
I'm thinking that it's more likely that the Army doesn't use ".org". ".mil" works well, but ".org" isn't going to get you diddly.
Utility and low-tech (Score:2)
I'm not sure how practical it is, though. It's all about cryptanalysis the old fashioned way (i.e. before computers). Still, I suppose it is good to acknowledge that the enemy may surprise us by taking a low-tech approach.
You mean if they surprise us by doing exactly the same thing we would have to do if the computers weren't available, right? You would be surprised how practical low-tech methods can be.
Re:Utility? (Score:2)
Last time I checked computers where available 15 years ago.
I seem to remember that the British used computers for cryptanalysis all they way back in WWII.
I would bet the most nations used computers for cryptanalysis for many decades. Many of the methods in the book could be converted into a program and uses to verify that new encryption systems can not be solved using these old methods.
Re:Utility? (Score:2)
Next thing you know, you'll tell me you can't use a slide rule!
Re:Utility? (Score:2)
It would actually suprise you that some guy living in a cave in Afghanistan or a bombed out house in Fallujah would not have access to a computer? You're kidding right?
Old news for Nerds. Stuff that mattered (Score:2)
Re:Old news for Nerds. Stuff that mattered (Score:2)
Cryptanalytics 101: Pop Quiz (Score:4, Interesting)
"B22 z1vs cb64 S c4m1o7 3 vt!!!"
Re:Cryptanalytics 101: Pop Quiz (Score:5, Insightful)
Case sensitive +1 shift on 1337 translation of Engrish text, punctuation/spacing excluded.
0) Cypertext: "B22 z1vs cb64 S c4m107 3 vt!!!"
1) Intermediate 1337: "A11 y0ur ba53 R b3l0ng 2 us!!!" --NB, "A11" not "All" as previous translators have given.
2) Engrish Plaintext: "All your base are belong to us!!!"
55 47 55 2e 20 55 4e 41 51 2e
Why can't we moderate posts "incoherent"? (Score:2)
Re:Cryptanalytics 101: Pop Quiz (Score:2, Informative)
1) UGU. UNAQ.
2) HTH. HAND.
3) Hope That Helps. Have A Nice Day.
01010110 01000111 01101000 01101100 01001001 01000111 00110101 01101100 01100101 01001000 01010001 01100111 01100011 00110010 01101000 01110110 01100100 01010111 01111000 01101011 01001001 01000111 01001010 01101100 01001001 01000111 01101000 01101000 01100011 01101101 01010010 01101100 01100011 01101001 00110100 01001011
Thinks a soldier needs to know about encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
Above and beyond that is gravy - if some soldier who's MOS is not codebreaking wants to try when he isn't doing his MOS, great.
Re:Thinks a soldier needs to know about encryption (Score:2, Informative)
MOS - Military Occupational Specialty--formal job classification, usually expressed as a number or number/letter combination--e.g., 11B Infantryman.
Distribution Restriction (Score:3, Informative)
Is this document classified or are these just standard warnings with no teeth? Is our dissemination of this 15-yr-old document criminal?
Re:Distribution Restriction (Score:2, Informative)
FOUO is by itself not classified, but it is not releasable under the Freedom of Information Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_informatio n [wikipedia.org]
Re:Distribution Restriction (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Distribution Restriction (Score:5, Informative)
don't worry (Score:2, Funny)
ASVAB (Score:2, Funny)
Re:ASVAB (Score:2)
Distribution terms for army manuals? (Score:2, Insightful)
DISTRIBUTION: Active Army, USAR, and ARNG: To be distributed in accordance with DA Form 12-11E, requirements for FM 34-40-2, Basic Cryptanalysts, (Qty rqr block no. 4607) and FM 34-3, Intelligence Analysis (Qty rqr block no, 1119).
I'm not sure if an army manual can be distributed openly like this. What exactly does DA Form 12-11E say about distribution of such manuals, can someone from the Army who knows the details explain the legal aspect?
Re:Distribution terms for army manuals? (Score:3, Interesting)
Modern Battlefield (Score:5, Interesting)
In the COC (Combat Operations Center, center of confusion, or simply Circle of Cocksuckers), we had many little toys, ranging from Toshiba toughbooks to proxima projectors, etc. We used microwave relay to keep in touch with group and make sure our batallion commander was seeing the same operational picture that 1st FSSG was seeing.
That was all done via an electronically encrypted network. Which is fine and dandy when you have:
For forward units and combat units in the field the only thing they have that comes close is the field radio. While the encryption on these things is very advanced, the radio's are bullet, shock and explosion proof. Yes, the guy carrying your map, and perhaps a list of checkpoints might not be around forever. That is why field and forward units still have to employ non-electronic means of deciet and encryption. Even if it's as simple as one guy having the map, and the other guy having a clear piece of plastic with lines drawn on it.
If U.S. Marines and soldiers are still using "old fasioned" techniqies such as this, one could surmise that our enemies are doing the same.
Therefore, that old manual may have some relevance.
Re:Modern Battlefield (Score:5, Interesting)
I was in a unit which replicated Marxist/Viet Cong style guerrillas, and we were able to use methods like this to great effect. Since we were replicating low-tech guerrillas, most of our radios were Vietnam-era, with controls like Fisher Price's My First Radio (PRC-77 for those interested). However, we were able to confound our opponents (the regular Army) on a regular basis using very simple codes, while at the same time penetrating their networks almost as regularly.
We had a pre-defined encryption scheme that radio operators were required to memorize. Mostly it was just simple word substitution, along with a simple way of encoding numbers. The key was that we all new each other and used knowledge common to all that the enemy had no way of knowing. We would avoid giving out locations more detailed than "300m South of that place we had lunch last week".
The reason these methods worked was twofold. First, the information was only useful for a limited amount of time. So even if you figured out that "Beaker plus one, minus 5, Donkeypunch plus 3 plus 1 Boomhauer minus 6 plus 2" was really grid VQ 606 419, it wouldn't do you much good because we weren't there anymore. Second, the people who were actually capable of figuring this stuff out were way in the rear, and the overhead of getting the information to the grunts (or crunchies as we always called them) on the ground was so much that it basically never happened.
Re:Modern Battlefield (Score:2)
Ah yes. The good old PRC. In FA school we used these. Ah, and do you remember reading crypto keys from punched tape?
Re:Modern Battlefield (Score:2)
Ah yes. The good old PRC.
It was still used in IDF when I left it, in 1997.
Probably still used in bootcamps.
Appendix D (Score:2, Interesting)
FOUO (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:FOUO (Score:2)
Re:FOUO (Score:2)
Code breaking: This requires a manual? (Score:2)
My secret? I find that randomly inserting punctuation will break just about any code...
Between Silk and Cyanide (Score:2, Redundant)
It was a really great read...
Code Breaker (Score:2, Funny)
from the terces-egassem-seog-ereh dept (Score:3, Funny)
m-
This is the is the manual for 98C's... (Score:5, Insightful)
FOUO classification means it shouldn't have been published at all. Just because it's common knowledge does NOT declassify a document. The document can only be declassified by the originating authority (the people who wrote it, and classified it to begin with). You'll see "DECL:OADR" on these docs a lot - "Declassify on Originating Authority Directive".
This FM is meant to teach the basics of cryptology to ASVAB-passing recruits. We run through the whole thing. Some very smart people go into Intel. Some pretty dumb ones do too
Everyone is expected to pass the final after this is taught, which consists of 4 days worth of simulated "traffic" being passed between target stations. We've reference books for traffic pattern types, run locational analysis, crack subsitution ciphers - it's romping good fun.
The encryption methods taught are still used in the field, though less and less thanks to the Internet, crypto-secured frequency-hopping radios, and whatnot, mostly for Meteo and Logistics.
Brings back some nostalgia, reading though this. I hope they don't get into too much trouble for posting it.
Re:This is the is the manual for 98C's... (Score:2)
Good source for "puzzles" (Score:2)
I'd like to know if there is a good "exercise" book or website with many puzzles of increasing difficulty, including several that may need a computer. I'd much rather do this as an intellectual exercise than crosswords.
Any ideas? The select few web sites I've found tend to have one simple exercise (monoalphabetic cypher) and then suddenly change to really complex ones.
Dated and Rather Useless (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Usrh, dp? (Score:3, Funny)
It's old (Score:2)
More than 15 years old (Score:2)
It may have a 1990 date on it, but it's 1945-vintage stuff. I suspect it's just the latest reprint of a much older publication.
Re:We already know all about it (Score:2)
Re:Here is a combined Version (Score:2)