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 12. Ciphers

It is easy to think of computers as giant calculators, and indeed the task of

calculation and its mechanisation contributed both to the idea of construct-
ing such a machine and to the conception of the tasks to which it might
be addressed. Difficult calculation tasks such as those involved in ballistics
(particularly in wartime) provided some of the stimulus towards the post-
Second-World-War development of computers. But we have just seen, in
the previous chapter, how a really rather different kind of task stimulated a
form of mechanisation that brought us close to the computer era. The major
stimulus for the actual invention of computers came from another domain
again.
The challenge was that of breaking the codes used by enemies in order
to be able to read their supposedly secret messages, in the technological
hothouse that was the Second World War. In order to see how this came
about, we again start much earlier.

Codes and ciphers

Throughout history, people have felt the need to write messages (point-to-
point messages, in terms of our previous discussion) that would be unread-
able to anyone other than the intended recipient, specifically to anyone who
might intercept it en route. Military commands, intelligence reports, in-
structions to agents, love letters, arrangements for meetings, plans for any
kind of action or activity that could prompt counter-measures of any kind by
any third party—all these and many more might be deemed by the sender
to need encryption.
Since the word code is somewhat overloaded in present-day usage, I will
use the word encryption to indicate putting some message into code, in such
a way that it can only be read by someone who has the key to the code, and

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132 B C, Before Computers

cipher for the method or rules for doing so. The original message is plain
text and encryption results in the encrypted or cipher message. Recovering
the plain text (given the key) is decryption. Discovering the key, or even
the complete cipher system I may still refer to as code-breaking, in deference
to popular usage. The whole subject, of designing ciphers and of breaking
them, and of studying their properties (such as whether in principle they
are breakable) is cryptography.
A book with a marvellous account of the different kinds of ciphers that
have been used through history, and of the efforts of opponents to break
them, is Simon Singh’s The Code Book. Much of the rest of this chapter is
drawn from Singh’s book.

The alphabet and encryption

From the beginning and to this day there has been some use of word-based
coding systems. A report in a newspaper on my table today describes a
case in which some alleged terrorist plotters “used code words” for some
possibly suspicious-sounding words, like firearms. But such systems are
really intended to disguise or camouflage a coded message, rendering it less
suspicious and therefore less likely to attract attention. Another approach
is to hide the existence of a message altogether.
However, most of cryptography addresses the question of how to render
a message unreadable even when the adversary is in possession of what he
or she suspects or knows to be a cipher message. Once again, it is hard to
conceive of much of the history of encryption without the alphabet. Most
encryption systems throughout history have been alphabet-based. Ciphers
typically involve either or both of: re-arranging the letters of the message,
and/or substituting different characters for those in the message. Even in
Japan and China, we see evidence of the use of alphabets or alphabet-like
symbol sets for encryption. Japanese ciphers tend to be based on one of the
phonetic alphabets (kana), while a Chinese cipher might use, for example,
either a phonetic alphabet or the so-called Four Corner method of encod-
ing each character into four or five numbers, which is also used as a sort of
substitute for alphbetical order, for sorting and then looking up characters.
Given an alphabet, one of the simplest kinds of encryption is to substitute
for each letter in a message the letter three places further on in the alphabet
 12. Ciphers 133

(this was a cipher used by Julius Caesar). If I do this with the heading of
this section, I get

Wkh doskdehw dqg hqfubswlrq.

Or I could choose a different shift, or I could rearrange the cipher alphabet

in some way. My intended recipient needs to know what cipher system I
have used, a key that will enable him or her to decrypt the message: both
the principle (‘alphabet shift’, for example) and the number of characters
shifted.
But as we shall see in a minute, such ciphers, in which a plaintext e is
always represented by the same symbol in the cipher message (in this case
an h) are normally very easy to break. To make a stronger cipher, we might
use all 26 possible shifts of the alphabet, and a key that tells us which shift
to use for which letter. The key is a word, whose first letter tells us which
shift to use for the first letter of the message, second for the second, and so
on. When we reach the end of the codeword, we return to the beginning.
This is the basis for a Vigenère cipher, invented by Blaise de Vigenère in the
sixteenth century.
The Vigenère cipher makes use of the Vigenère square, showing all pos-
sible shifts of the alphabet (see Figure 18). Suppose that we again want to
encrypt the heading of this section, and the codeword is revolution. We write
out the plain text, and underneath it the codeword, repeated as many times
as are necessary to match every letter of the plain text. Then we look up each
plain text letter in the top row of the Vigenère square, and encrypt it with
the corresponding letter in the row identified by the codeword letter. The
first lookup (column T row R) is circled in the figure. Given the codeword,
decryption is equally simple—but you need the codeword.

THE ALPHABET AND ENCRYPTION plain text

REV OLUTIONR EVO LUTIONREVO repeated codeword
KLZ OWJAIPRK EIR PHVZMCKMJB cipher text

The Vigenère cipher is much stronger than the simple substitution of the
alphabet shift, and was thought to be unbreakable. In the example, you
can see that the two As in alphabet are represented by different letters in
the cipher text. But it can be broken—the man who established this fact is
134 B C, Before Computers

Figure 18: Vigenère square. Diagram: the author.

someone we have already encountered in Chapter 10: the nineteenth cen-

tury mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage.

Code breaking

Suppose that I am in possession of a cipher message, or a set of such mes-

sages from a single source—but that I am not the intended recipient, and
do not know the cipher. If I have any reason to believe that the cipher is a
simple alphabet shift, or indeed any simple one-for-one substitution, then it
should be easy for me to discover the key and thus decrypt it. In particular,
the number of occurrences of each letter will provide a clear clue as to which
letters might have been substituted for, say, E or T or A (the most common
letters in English). The longer the message the easier this is, but in the above
short message I have three each of E and T, and also N, and only two As
Even so, we see immediately that breaking is a different kind of task from
 12. Ciphers 135

encryption and decryption. Encryption, and decryption for the recipient

in possession of the key, both involve following a very simple set of rules.
Breaking the cipher, however, is a little more complex. The code-breaker
may have to do some counting and statistics, and then try out a number of
possibilities.
Babbage’s method of breaking the Vigenère cipher involves looking for
repeated sequences of characters in the cipher message. The distances be-
tween such sequences will give good clues as to the length of the keyword
used, after which an extended form of the analysis of the statistics of let-
ter occurrence, as used to break simple substitution ciphers, is likely to be
effective.
However, using a longer key (for example a phrase or an entire poem)
makes it more difficult to break. The final stage of this development was
to construct a whole series of long random keys, each printed on a separate
sheet of paper, forming a pad, of which sender and receiver would each have
a copy. The sender would encrypt a message using the first sheet, and would
then discard the first sheet so that it would never be used again. The receiver
would decrypt it also using the first sheet, and then discard the sheet. This
cipher, the one-time pad, was invented by Joseph Mauborgne for the US Army
at the end of the First World War, and is known to be unbreakable by anyone
not in possession of the one-time pad. Its major limitation is the necessity
for producing and securely distributing the pad.
In fact the process of inventing better ciphers (by those trying to send
and receive secure messages) and devising ways of breaking them (by their
enemies) is a game people have played for millennia.

Methods and machines

Given that the processes of encryption and decryption are normally based
on well-defined rules, it’s a little surprising that the use of mechanical aids
was relatively slow to get going. Simple substitution ciphers require no
more than a two-row table: plain-text letters on the top row and substitutes
on the bottom. The Vigenère cipher requires a square table, with each of
the 26 possible alphabet shifts on its own row. Even the one-time pad is
essentially paper-based.
However, it is also possible to make a simple mechanical device to help
136 B C, Before Computers

with either the simple substitution or Vigenère-style encryption and decryp-

tion, in the form of a pair of disks, one inside the other. The letters of the
alphabet are written around the edge of each disk, and the inner disk is ro-
tated relative to the outer disk to set up a single substitution table. If it is
further rotated during encryption, a Vigenère-style cipher is produced.
Such a disk was invented by Leon Alberti in the fifteenth century, and
similar devices were in use for a long time, including during the American
Civil War. Perhaps surprisingly, it was not until the twentieth century that
the use of machinery for encryption and decryption advanced much further.
However, the application of a complex cipher system really does suggest or
even demand machinery: the more complex the rules to be applied, the
more important it is to delegate their operation to a machine, which might
be expected not to make mistakes.
Mechanisation of encryption and decryption did not really take off until
the invention of the Enigma machine. The German military famously used
Enigma as their preferred cipher device during the Second World War, both
for encryption and decryption, with daily changing keys; and the British,
equally famously, had at Bletchley Park an establishment devoted to read-
ing German cipher messages, which did in fact repeatedly and successfully
break these daily ciphers.

Enigma

Enigma generates a letter-by-letter substitution of the clear message, but the

substitution table effectively changes with every letter. But unlike the orig-
inal keyword-based Vigenère system, the table does not repeat itself every
few letters. It is more comparable to the one-time pad.
It is a fascinating machine in its own right. Developed in 1918 by Arthur
Scherbius, it looks very much like a typewriter—in fact the keyboard is
closely based on Sholes’ keyboard described in Chapter 5 (which by 1918
was well established as the standard form of keyboard for typewriters). But
instead of paper, the back of the machine has a replica of the keyboard in
a lampboard, an arrangement of lettered disks each with a lamp behind
it—see Figure 19. (You might note in passing that this keyboard differs a lit-
tle from the Scholes typewriter keyboard (Chapter 5), although obviously
derived from it. In particular, the offsets differ—having only three rows,
 12. Ciphers 137

the offsets are one-third of the key width. Experienced touch-typists would
have noticed this!)

The letter L is pressed, and the D lamp is on.

Figure 19: Enigma machine

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Enigma_Machine_A16672_open,_letter_L_pressed.agr.jpg
CC BY-SA 4.0.

The clear message is typed in, as it might be on a typewriter, but at each

keystroke, instead of printing, one of these lamps is illuminated, indicating
a new letter—the cipher code to be used for the letter just typed in. The
illuminated letter then has to be recorded somehow—written down or typed
or transmitted directly.
The mechanisms that allow the continually-changing table of substitu-
tions are several and ingenious, and I will not attempt to describe them here.
They depended on initial settings, which were changed daily; once into a
message, the settings were changed automatically by the process of typing
the message. That is, every keystroke resulted not only in the coding of one
letter of the message, but also in re-arranging the table of correspondences
for the next keystroke.
The resulting cipher was extremely complex and difficult to break, but
138 B C, Before Computers

the complexity arose not so much from complex rules, as from a combina-
tion of many applications of simple rules. This is exactly the province of the
machinery of the time, and it is no surprise that encryption and decryption
should have succumbed to some such form of mechanisation, not long after
the typewriter and the comptometer.

Breaking Enigma

As I have indicated, code-breaking is a different order of task altogether.

Almost inevitably, given a series of cipher messages, breaking the cipher
system involves a combination of knowledge or guesswork as to the mech-
anisms involved in the cipher (or rather the rules which they mechanise),
knowledge or guesswork about some key settings, and trial and error. There
is a very strong sense in which code-breaking is an art-form. Like any art
form it has its supporting technology (both in the form of machinery and
in the form of know-how, methods and ways of doing things, sets of rules
that may be applied), but it needs inspiration as well. This is certainly not
true of encryption or decryption. It could be said to be true of devising new
cipher systems—and indeed there are a couple of late-twentieth-century in-
ventions here that look truly inspired—but as a hothouse for developing
new ways of thinking, it is hard to beat Bletchley Park.
Bletchley Park was the Second World War UK Government establish-
ment in charge of attempts to read any intercepted cipher enemy messages.
Many messages to or from military units of all kinds, of the German or other
Axis powers, were intercepted and sent to Bletchley Park. And for much of
the war many of these messages were successfully decrypted. There was al-
ways a challenge at the beginning of the day, because the keys were changed
each day and the new key had to be discovered from some of the early mes-
sages intercepted. Then for some longer intervals, weeks or months, a par-
ticular cipher might become unreadable because of a change in some part of
the encryption procedure by the Germans—until the Bletchley Park people
had discovered how to deal with this new variant.
 12. Ciphers 139

Post-war cryptography

In the subsequent history of cryptography, following the end of the Second

World War, the computer has loomed large. Most modern cipher systems
are computer-based, in the sense that computer programs are used for en-
cryption and decryption as well as by the code-breakers. In fact most sys-
tems make use of the fact that a message in a computer (necessarily in one of
the binary codes discussed in Chapter 5) looks very much like a number, to
which arithmetic operations can be applied. Of course it isn’t really a num-
ber, but with certain safeguards we can pretend that it is. We can encrypt
by applying arithmetic operations to it such as addition and multiplication;
decryption then means reversing these operations.
One of the great discoveries of cryptography in this period is the princi-
ple of asymmetry. This is based on the fact that some arithmetic operations
are easy to perform in one direction, but much harder in the other (it’s easy
to multiply two large prime numbers; it’s much harder to factor the prod-
uct and rediscover the original two primes). The resulting cipher system
is known as Public Key Cryptography. It allows the person who wants to
receive a message in cipher to make public an encryption key; anyone who
wants to send him/her a message can use this key to encrypt it. However,
the decryption key is different. Only the recipient of the message knows this
decryption key—it need never be made available to anyone else. In princi-
ple, this makes for a much more secure setup—in almost all previous cipher
systems, sender and recipient would have to share a key, and the necessity
for sharing is a major source of insecurity.

Bletchley Park and its legacy

Despite the fact that cryptography really entered the machine age only after
the First World War, the challenge of cryptanalysis and code-breaking must
really be credited with kick-starting the IT revolution of the second half of
the twentieth century. In the end, we did not invent computers in order to
control machinery, as Jacquard might have done; we did not invent comput-
ers in order to do repetitive numerical calculation, as Babbage tried to do.
We did not invent them to analyse censuses; nor to organise our accounts or
do payroll; nor to do weather forecasting; nor to do word processing; nor to
140 B C, Before Computers

facilitate telecommunications; nor to play our music or look after our pho-
tographs—though they are very useful for all of these things and more. We
invented computers in order to break codes.
The operation of Bletchley Park depended very heavily on people: col-
lecting, transcribing, analysing the intercepted cipher messages. Initially,
all analysis was entirely by people, using essentially pencil and paper, and
human effort remained central to the code-breaking task. However, early
in the war the great Alan Turing designed a machine called a bombe, which
greatly helped in eliminating many possible initial settings (given a crib, a
human guess as to the plaintext version of a particular section of the cipher
text). This invention allowed Bletchley Park, for much of the war, to discover
the day’s new key settings early in the day, enabling the decryption of any
further messages that day as soon as they were received.
Later in the war, the Bletchley Park effort had serious difficulties with
another German system, the Lorentz cipher. This was similar to Enigma
but more complex, and it typically took weeks to break one day’s messages.
Max Newman, another Bletchley Park mathematician, started developing
plans for a new machine that would be much more adaptable than the
bombe—in fact, it was what we now describe as programmable. This was
much more difficult to build than the bombe, but eventually in late 1943 the
engineer Tommy Flowers designed and constructed a working version, us-
ing thermionic valves (as used in early radios). It was called the Colossus,
and with its help, the keys for Lorentz-ciphered messages could be discov-
ered quickly.
Colossus was the clear forerunner of the modern computer. It was elec-
tronic, digital, and in some sense programmable, and used many of the ideas
and principles and methods that a modern computer scientist would regard
as essentially those of a computer.

An act of vandalism

Then, at the end of the war, the entirety of what had been the Bletchley
Park operation was eliminated. Winston Churchill, who had been the chief
backer of Bletchley Park, ensuring funding for it against opposition from
some quarters, demanded that all evidence of the UK’s cryptographic abil-
ities should be utterly erased. Not only was Colossus itself destroyed, but
 12. Ciphers 141

all the blueprints for it were burnt. All Bletchley staff were required to keep
silent about anything at all that went on there.
Despite my heading, vandalism is a poor word to describe Churchill’s ac-
tion. It was a 2000-year throwback to the first emperor of China, in the sec-
ond century BCE—burning the library, in order to suppress the subversive
knowledge held therein.

The next phase

But it’s hard to kill an idea like that. In the world of the 1940s, outside
Bletchley Park, some of the necessary ideas were already coming together.
A project between IBM and Harvard University, masterminded by Howard
Aiken, developed the Harvard Mark 1, a giant programmable calculator
with many computer-like features, which first ran in 1943. The destruction
of Bletchley Park left behind, in addition to the handful of eccentrics who
believed in the possibility of building a computer, another handful who had
actually seen one in operation. Within a year or two immediately following
the war, academics in the UK (at Manchester and Cambridge) and in the
US (in Pennsylvania and elsewhere) started building computers. Within a
very few years, the computer age had taken off.
But that’s another story.