In the history of cryptography , the ECM Mark II was a cipher machine used by the United States for message encryption from World War II until the 1950s. The machine was also known as the SIGABA or Converter M-134 by the Army, or CSP-888/889 by the Navy, and a modified Navy version was termed the CSP-2900 .
106-495: Like many machines of the era it used an electromechanical system of rotors to encipher messages, but with a number of security improvements over previous designs. No successful cryptanalysis of the machine during its service lifetime is publicly known. It was clear to US cryptographers well before World War II that the single-stepping mechanical motion of rotor machines (e.g. the Hebern machine ) could be exploited by attackers. In
212-399: A plaintext letter in the cipher: if this is not the case, deciphering the message is more difficult. For many years, cryptographers attempted to hide the telltale frequencies by using several different substitutions for common letters, but this technique was unable to fully hide patterns in the substitutions for plaintext letters. Such schemes were being widely broken by the 16th century. In
318-566: A rotor machine is an electro-mechanical stream cipher device used for encrypting and decrypting messages. Rotor machines were the cryptographic state-of-the-art for much of the 20th century; they were in widespread use in the 1920s–1970s. The most famous example is the German Enigma machine , the output of which was deciphered by the Allies during World War II, producing intelligence code-named Ultra . The primary component of
424-565: A 'long' key could be generated from a simple pattern (ideally automatically), producing a cipher in which there are so many substitution alphabets that frequency counting and statistical attacks would be effectively impossible. Enigma, and the rotor machines generally, were just what was needed since they were seriously polyalphabetic, using a different substitution alphabet for each letter of plaintext, and automatic, requiring no extraordinary abilities from their users. Their messages were, generally, much harder to break than any previous ciphers. It
530-702: A Basque-coded message from San Diego for Admiral Chester Nimitz . The message warned Nimitz of Operation Apple to remove the Japanese from the Solomon Islands . They also translated the start date, August 7, for the attack on Guadalcanal . As the war extended over the Pacific, there was a shortage of Basque speakers, and the US military came to prefer the parallel program based on the use of Navajo speakers. In 2017, Pedro Oiarzabal and Guillermo Tabernilla published
636-633: A Mohawk code talker born in Canada, was deployed to protect messages sent by Allied Forces using Kanien'kéha , a Mohawk sub-set language. Oakes died in May 2019; he was the last of the Mohawk code talkers. The Muscogee language was used as a type two code (informal) during World War II by enlisted Seminole and Creek people in the US Army. Tony Palmer, Leslie Richard, Edmund Harjo , and Thomas MacIntosh from
742-527: A cam that caused the rotor to stop in the proper position during the zeroize process. SIGABA's rotors were all housed in a removable frame held in place by four thumb screws. This allowed the most sensitive elements of the machine to be stored in more secure safes and to be quickly thrown overboard or otherwise destroyed if capture was threatened. It also allowed a machine to quickly switch between networks that used different rotor orders. Messages had two 5- character indicators, an exterior indicator that specified
848-672: A civil engineer for the city of Los Angeles, proposed the use of the Navajo language to the United States Marine Corps at the beginning of World War II. Johnston, a World War I veteran, was raised on the Navajo reservation as the son of missionaries to the Navajo. He was able to converse in what is called "Trader's Navajo" - a pidgin language . He was among a few non-Navajo who had enough exposure to it to understand some of its nuances. Many Navajo men enlisted shortly after
954-642: A code against Japanese forces. Their actions remained unknown, even after the declassification of code talkers and the publication of the Navajo code talkers. The memory of five deceased Tlingit code talkers was honored by the Alaska legislature in March 2019. A system employing the Welsh language was used by British forces during World War II, but not to any great extent. In 1942, the Royal Air Force developed
1060-480: A complex, pseudorandom fashion. This meant that attacks which could break other rotor machines with simpler stepping (for example, Enigma) were made much more complex. Even with the plaintext in hand, there were so many potential inputs to the encryption that it was difficult to work out the settings. On the downside, the SIGABA was also large, heavy, expensive, difficult to operate, mechanically complex, and fragile. It
1166-708: A conversation in Choctaw . Upon further investigation, he found eight Choctaw men served in the battalion. The Choctaw men in the Army's 36th Infantry Division were trained to use their language in code. They helped the American Expeditionary Forces in several battles of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive . On October 26, 1918, the code talkers were pressed into service and the "tide of battle turned within 24 hours ... and within 72 hours
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#17327981653391272-459: A different substitution for every letter, but this usually meant a very long key, which was a problem in several ways. A long key takes longer to convey (securely) to the parties who need it, and so mistakes are more likely in key distribution. Also, many users do not have the patience to carry out lengthy, letter-perfect evolutions, and certainly not under time pressure or battlefield stress. The 'ultimate' cipher of this type would be one in which such
1378-411: A four character match should be accepted. The manual also gave suggestions on how to generate random strings for creating indicators. These included using playing cards and poker chips, to selecting characters from cipher texts and using the SIGABA itself as a random character generator. Although the SIGABA was extremely secure, the US continued to upgrade its capability throughout the war, for fear of
1484-463: A handful of different alphabets could be used; anything more complex would be impractical. However, using only a few alphabets left the ciphers vulnerable to attack. The invention of rotor machines mechanised polyalphabetic encryption, providing a practical way to use a much larger number of alphabets. The earliest cryptanalytic technique was frequency analysis , in which letter patterns unique to every language could be used to discover information about
1590-607: A paper refuting Euzko Deya ' s article. According to Oiarzabal and Tabernilla, they could not find Carranza, Aguirre, Fernández Bakaicoa, or Juanana in the National Archives and Records Administration or US Army archives. They did find a small number of US Marines with Basque surnames , but none of them worked in transmissions. They suggest that Carranza's story was an Office of Strategic Services operation to raise sympathy for US intelligence among Basque nationalists. The US military's first known use of code talkers
1696-448: A personal bodyguard whose principal duty was to protect them from their side. According to Bill Toledo, one of the second groups after the original 29, they had a secret secondary duty: if their charge was at risk of being captured, they were to shoot him to protect the code. Fortunately, none was ever called upon to do so. To ensure consistent use of code terminologies throughout the Pacific theater, representative code talkers of each of
1802-687: A plan to use Welsh for secret communications, but it was never implemented. Welsh was used more recently in the Yugoslav Wars for non-vital messages. China used Wenzhounese -speaking people as code talkers during the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War . The Navajo code talkers received no recognition until 1968 when their operation was declassified. In 1982, the code talkers were given a Certificate of Recognition by US President Ronald Reagan , who also named August 14, 1982 as Navajo Code Talkers Day. On December 21, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed Public Law 106–554, 114 Statute 2763, which awarded
1908-402: A rotor machine is a set of rotors , also termed wheels or drums , which are rotating disks with an array of electrical contacts on either side. The wiring between the contacts implements a fixed substitution of letters, replacing them in some complex fashion. On its own, this would offer little security; however, before or after encrypting each letter, the rotors advance positions, changing
2014-488: Is an accepted version of this page A code talker was a person employed by the military during wartime to use a little-known language as a means of secret communication. The term is most often used for United States service members during the World Wars who used their knowledge of Native American languages as a basis to transmit coded messages. In particular, there were approximately 400 to 500 Native Americans in
2120-439: Is inspired by Enigma, but makes use of 40-point rotors, allowing letters, numbers and some punctuation; each rotor contains 509 parts. A software implementation of a rotor machine was used in the crypt command that was part of early UNIX operating systems. It was among the first software programs to run afoul of U.S. export regulations which classified cryptographic implementations as munitions. Code talkers This
2226-417: Is straightforward to create a machine for performing simple substitution. In an electrical system with 26 switches attached to 26 light bulbs, any one of the switches will illuminate one of the bulbs. If each switch is operated by a key on a typewriter , and the bulbs are labelled with letters, then such a system can be used for encryption by choosing the wiring between the keys and the bulb: for example, typing
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#17327981653392332-823: The Battle of the Atlantic . During World War II (WWII), both the Germans and Allies developed additional rotor machines. The Germans used the Lorenz SZ 40/42 and Siemens and Halske T52 machines to encipher teleprinter traffic which used the Baudot code ; this traffic was known as Fish to the Allies. The Allies developed the Typex (British) and the SIGABA (American). During the War
2438-660: The Congressional Gold Medal to the original 29 World War II Navajo code talkers and Silver Medals to each person who qualified as a Navajo code talker (approximately 300). In July 2001, President George W. Bush honored the code talkers by presenting the medals to four surviving original code talkers (the fifth living original code talker was unable to attend) at a ceremony held in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC. Gold medals were presented to
2544-627: The Fort Belknap Indian Reservation of Montana and became a tribal judge and politician. In November 1952, Euzko Deya magazine reported that sometime in May 1942, upon meeting a large number of US Marines of Basque ancestry in a San Francisco camp, Captain Frank D. Carranza had thought of using the Basque language for codes. His superiors were concerned about risk, as there were known settlements of Basque people in
2650-813: The German Army began to use a different variant around 1928. The Enigma (in several variants) was the rotor machine that Scherbius's company and its successor, Heimsoth & Reinke, supplied to the German military and to such agencies as the Nazi party security organization, the SD . The Poles broke the German Army Enigma beginning in December 1932, not long after it had been put into service. On July 25, 1939, just five weeks before Hitler's invasion of Poland,
2756-531: The Latin alphabet ) before the key repeats, and yet it still only requires you to communicate a key of two letters/numbers to set things up. If a key of 676 length is not long enough, another rotor can be added, resulting in a period 17,576 letters long. In order to be as easy to decipher as encipher, some rotor machines, most notably the Enigma machine , embodied a symmetric-key algorithm , i.e., encrypting twice with
2862-863: The Polish General Staff 's Cipher Bureau shared its Enigma-decryption methods and equipment with the French and British as the Poles' contribution to the common defense against Nazi Germany. Dilly Knox had already broken Spanish Nationalist messages on a commercial Enigma machine in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War . A few months later, using the Polish techniques, the British began reading Enigma ciphers in collaboration with Polish Cipher Bureau cryptologists who had escaped Poland, overrun by
2968-832: The President of the Navajo Nation , Russell Begaye , appeared with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office in an official White House ceremony. They were there to "pay tribute to the contributions of the young Native Americans recruited by the United States military to create top-secret coded messages used to communicate during World War II battles." The executive director of the National Congress of American Indians , Jacqueline Pata , noted that Native Americans have "a very high level of participation in
3074-915: The Russo-Ukrainian War , the Hungarian language is reported to be used by the Ukrainian army to relay operational military information and orders to circumvent being understood by the invading Russian army without the need to encrypt and decipher the messages. Ukraine has a sizeable Hungarian population of over 150,000 people who live mainly in the Kárpátalja (in Hungarian) or Zakarpatska Oblast (in Ukrainian) division of Ukraine, adjacent to Hungary . As Ukrainian nationals, men of enlistment age are also subject to military service, hence
3180-445: The SIGABA . Just over 10,000 machines were built. On 26 June 1942, the Army and Navy agreed not to allow SIGABA machines to be placed in foreign territory except where armed American personnel were able to protect the machine. The SIGABA would be made available to another Allied country only if personnel of that country were denied direct access to the machine or its operation by an American liaison officer who would operate it. SIGABA
3286-642: The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and Muscogee (Creek) Nation were recognized under the Code Talkers Recognition Act of 2008 . The last survivor of these code talkers, Edmond Harjo of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma , died on March 31, 2014, at the age of 96. His biography was recounted at the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony honoring Harjo and other code talkers at the US Capitol on November 20, 2013. Philip Johnston ,
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3392-607: The Swiss began development on an Enigma improvement which became the NEMA machine which was put into service after World War II. There was even a Japanese developed variant of the Enigma in which the rotors sat horizontally; it was apparently never put into service. The Japanese PURPLE machine was not a rotor machine, being built around electrical stepping switches , but was conceptually similar. Rotor machines continued to be used even in
3498-651: The Typex . The common machine was known as the Combined Cipher Machine (CCM), and was used from November 1943. Because of the high cost of production, only 631 CCMs were made. The third way was the most common and most cost-effective. It was the "X" Adapter manufactured by the Teletype Corporation in Chicago. A total of 4,500 of these adapters were installed at depot-level maintenance facilities. Rotor machine In cryptography ,
3604-511: The US Army 's SIS promptly demonstrated a flaw in the system that allowed the ciphers from it, and from any machine with similar design features, to be cracked with enough work. Another early rotor machine inventor was Dutchman Hugo Koch , who filed a patent on a rotor machine in 1919. At about the same time in Sweden , Arvid Gerhard Damm invented and patented another rotor design. However,
3710-630: The Ukrainian army has a Hungarian-speaking capability. It is one of the most spoken and official languages of this region in present-day Ukraine . The Hungarian language is not an Indo-European language like the Slavic Ukrainian or Russian , but a Uralic language . For this reason, it is distinct and incomprehensible for Russian speakers. A group of 27 Meskwaki enlisted in the US Army together in January 1941; they comprised 16 percent of Iowa's Meskwaki population. During World War II,
3816-530: The United States Army during World War II, including Lakota , Meskwaki , Mohawk , Comanche , Tlingit , Hopi , Cree , and Crow soldiers; they served in the Pacific, North African, and European theaters. Native speakers of the Assiniboine language served as code talkers during World War II to encrypt communications. One of these code talkers was Gilbert Horn Sr. , who grew up in
3922-713: The United States Department of Defense presented Charles Chibitty with the Knowlton Award , in recognition of his outstanding intelligence work. In World War II , the Canadian Armed Forces employed First Nations soldiers who spoke the Cree language as code talkers. Owing to oaths of secrecy and official classification through 1963, the role of Cree code talkers was less well-known than their US counterparts and went unacknowledged by
4028-536: The United States Marine Corps whose primary job was to transmit secret tactical messages. Code talkers transmitted messages over military telephone or radio communications nets using formally or informally developed codes built upon their Indigenous languages. The code talkers improved the speed of encryption and decryption of communications in front line operations during World War II and are credited with some decisive victories. Their code
4134-399: The ciphertext , which provide clues about the length of the key. Once this is known, the message essentially becomes a series of messages, each as long as the length of the key, to which normal frequency analysis can be applied. Charles Babbage , Friedrich Kasiski , and William F. Friedman are among those who did most to develop these techniques. Cipher designers tried to get users to use
4240-476: The 1920s. He sold a small number of machines to the US Navy in 1931. In Hebern's machines the rotors could be opened up and the wiring changed in a few minutes, so a single mass-produced system could be sold to a number of users who would then produce their own rotor keying. Decryption consisted of taking out the rotor(s) and turning them around to reverse the circuitry. Unknown to Hebern, William F. Friedman of
4346-491: The 4th Signal Company compiled a vocabulary of 250 code terms using words and phrases in their own language. Using a substitution method similar to that of the Navajo , the code talkers used descriptive words from the Comanche language for things that did not have translations. For example, the Comanche language code term for tank was turtle , bomber was pregnant bird , machine gun was sewing machine , and Adolf Hitler
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4452-407: The Allies were on full attack." German authorities knew about the use of code talkers during World War I. Germans sent a team of thirty anthropologists to the United States to learn Native American languages before the outbreak of World War II. However, the task proved too difficult because of the large array of Indigenous languages and dialects . Nonetheless, after learning of the Nazi effort,
4558-459: The Axis cryptanalytic ability to break SIGABA's code. When the German's ENIGMA messages and Japan's Type B Cipher Machine were broken, the messages were closely scrutinized for signs that Axis forces were able to read the US cryptography codes. Axis prisoners of war (POWs) were also interrogated with the goal of finding evidence that US cryptography had been broken. However, neither the Germans nor
4664-628: The Canadian government. A 2016 documentary, Cree Code Talkers , tells the story of one such Métis individual, Charles "Checker" Tomkins . Tomkins died in 2003 but was interviewed shortly before his death by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian . While he identified other Cree code talkers, "Tomkins may have been the last of his comrades to know anything of this secret operation." In 2022 during
4770-634: The Enigma .) Scherbius joined forces with a mechanical engineer named Ritter and formed Chiffriermaschinen AG in Berlin before demonstrating Enigma to the public in Bern in 1923, and then in 1924 at the World Postal Congress in Stockholm . In 1927 Scherbius bought Koch's patents, and in 1928 they added a plugboard , essentially a non-rotating manually rewireable fourth rotor, on the front of
4876-646: The Fort Wingate, NM, area. The youngest was William Dean Yazzie (aka Dean Wilson), who was only 15 when he was recruited. The oldest was Carl N. Gorman —who with his son, R.C. Gorman, would become an artist of great acclaim and design the Code Talkers' logo—at age 35. The Navajo code was formally developed and modeled on the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet that uses agreed-upon English words to represent letters . Since it
4982-710: The Germans admitted that their progress in breaking US communications was unsatisfactory. The Japanese also admitted in their own communications that they had made no real progress against the American cipher system. In September 1944, when the Allies were advancing steadily on the Western front, the war diary of the German Signal Intelligence Group recorded: "U.S. 5-letter traffic: Work discontinued as unprofitable at this time". SIGABA systems were closely guarded at all times, with separate safes for
5088-449: The Germans, to reach Paris . The Poles continued breaking German Army Enigma—along with Luftwaffe Enigma traffic—until work at Station PC Bruno in France was shut down by the German invasion of May–June 1940. The British continued breaking Enigma and, assisted eventually by the United States, extended the work to German Naval Enigma traffic (which the Poles had been reading before the war), most especially to and from U-boats during
5194-569: The Japanese were making any progress in breaking the SIGABA code. A decrypted JN-A-20 message, dated 24 January 1942, sent from the naval attaché in Berlin to vice chief of Japanese Naval General Staff in Tokyo stated that "joint Jap[anese]-German cryptanalytical efforts" to be "highly satisfactory", since the "German[s] have exhibited commendable ingenuity and recently experienced some success on English Navy systems", but are "encountering difficulty in establishing successful techniques of attack on 'enemy' code setup". In another decrypted JN-A-20 message,
5300-418: The M-134-C. In 1935 they showed their work to Joseph Wenger , a cryptographer in the OP-20-G section of the U.S. Navy . He found little interest for it in the Navy until early 1937, when he showed it to Commander Laurance Safford , Friedman's counterpart in the Office of Naval Intelligence . He immediately saw the potential of the machine, and he and Commander Seiler then added a number of features to make
5406-439: The Marine Corps through the Korean War. Rumors of the deployment of the Navajo code into the Korean War and after have never been proven. The code remained classified until 1968. The Navajo code is the only spoken military code never to have been deciphered. In the 1973 Arab–Israeli War , Egypt employed Nubian -speaking Nubian people as code talkers. During World War II, American soldiers used their native Tlingit as
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#17327981653395512-417: The Navajo code at Camp Pendleton . One of the key features of the Navajo Code Talkers is that they employed a coded version of their language. Other Navajos not trained in the Navajo Code could not decipher the messages being sent. Platoon 382 was the Marine Corps' first "all-Indian, all-Navajo" Platoon. The members of this platoon would become known as The First Twenty-Nine . Most were recruited from near
5618-417: The Pacific Theater. In other theatres, less secure, but smaller, lighter, and sturdier machines were used, such as the M-209 . SIGABA, impressive as it was, was overkill for tactical communications. This said, new speculative evidence emerged more recently that the M-209 code was broken by German cryptanalysts during World War II. Because SIGABA did not have a reflector, a 26+ pole switch was needed to change
5724-508: The Pacific region, including: 35 Basque Jesuits in Hiroshima , led by Pedro Arrupe ; a colony of Basque jai alai players in China and the Philippines; and Basque supporters of Falange in Asia. Consequently, the US Basque code talkers were not deployed in these theaters; instead, they were used initially in tests and in transmitting logistics information for Hawaii and Australia. According to Euzko Deya , on August 1, 1942, Lieutenants Nemesio Aguirre, Fernández Bakaicoa, and Juanana received
5830-403: The US Army opted not to implement a large-scale code talker program in the European theater . Initially, 17 code talkers were enlisted, but three could not make the trip across the Atlantic until the unit was finally deployed. A total of 14 code talkers using the Comanche language took part in the Invasion of Normandy and served in the 4th Infantry Division in Europe. Comanche soldiers of
5936-412: The US Army trained eight Meskwaki men to use their native Fox language as code talkers. They were assigned to North Africa. The eight were posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2013; the government gave the awards to representatives of the Meskwaki community. Mohawk language code talkers were used during World War II by the United States Army in the Pacific theater. Levi Oakes ,
6042-444: The US Marine divisions met in Hawaii to discuss shortcomings in the code, incorporate new terms into the system, and update their codebooks. These representatives, in turn, trained other code talkers who could not attend the meeting. As the war progressed, additional code words were added and incorporated program-wide. In other instances, informal shortcuts code words were devised for a particular campaign and not disseminated beyond
6148-611: The age of 94. On May 10, 2019, Fleming Begaye Sr. died at the age of 97. New Mexico State Senator John Pinto , elected in 1977, died in office on May 24, 2019. William Tully Brown died in June 2019 aged 96. Joe Vandever Sr. died at 96 on January 31, 2020. Samuel Sandoval died on 29 July 2022, at the age of 98. John Kinsel Sr. died on 18 October 2024, at the age of 107. Only two remaining members are still living as of 2024, Thomas H. Began and former Navajo chairman Peter MacDonald . Some code talkers such as Chester Nez and William Dean Yazzie (aka Dean Wilson) continued to serve in
6254-443: The already-awarded Navajo) with a Congressional Gold Medal. The act was designed to be distinct for each tribe, with silver duplicates awarded to the individual code talkers or their next-of-kin. As of 2013, 33 tribes have been identified and been honored at a ceremony at Emancipation Hall at the US Capitol Visitor Center. One surviving code talker was present, Edmond Harjo. On November 27, 2017, three Navajo code talkers, joined by
6360-456: The area of operation. Examples of code words include the Navajo word for buzzard , jeeshóóʼ , which was used for bomber , while the code word used for submarine , béésh łóóʼ , meant iron fish in Navajo. The last of the original 29 Navajo code talkers who developed the code, Chester Nez , died on June 4, 2014. Four of the last nine Navajo code talkers used in the military died in 2019: Alfred K. Newman died on January 13, 2019, at
6466-581: The attack on Pearl Harbor and eagerly contributed to the war effort. Because Navajo has a complex grammar , it is not mutually intelligible with even its closest relatives within the Na-Dene family to provide meaningful information. It was still an unwritten language at the time, and Johnston believed Navajo could satisfy the military requirement for an undecipherable code. Its complex syntax, phonology, and numerous dialects made it unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training. One estimate indicates that fewer than 30 non-Navajo could understand
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#17327981653396572-439: The case of the famous Enigma machine , these attacks were supposed to be upset by moving the rotors to random locations at the start of each new message. This, however, proved not to be secure enough, and German Enigma messages were frequently broken by cryptanalysis during World War II. William Friedman , director of the US Army 's Signals Intelligence Service , devised a system to correct for this attack by truly randomizing
6678-453: The computer age. The KL-7 (ADONIS), an encryption machine with 8 rotors, was widely used by the U.S. and its allies from the 1950s until the 1980s. The last Canadian message encrypted with a KL-7 was sent on June 30, 1983. The Soviet Union and its allies used a 10-rotor machine called Fialka well into the 1970s. A unique rotor machine called the Cryptograph was constructed in 2002 by Netherlands -based Tatjana van Vark. This unusual device
6784-446: The course of a single plaintext. The idea is simple and effective, but proved more difficult to use than might have been expected. Many ciphers were only partial implementations of Alberti's, and so were easier to break than they might have been (e.g. the Vigenère cipher ). Not until the 1840s (Babbage) was any technique known which could reliably break any of the polyalphabetic ciphers. His technique also looked for repeating patterns in
6890-425: The families of the deceased 24 original code talkers. Journalist Patty Talahongva directed and produced a documentary, The Power of Words: Native Languages as Weapons of War , for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in 2006, bringing to light the story of Hopi code talkers. In 2011, Arizona established April 23, as an annual recognition day for the Hopi code talkers. The Texas Medal of Valor
6996-428: The keyboard increments the rotor position and get a new substitution, implementing a polyalphabetic substitution cipher. Depending on the size of the rotor, this may, or may not, be more secure than hand ciphers. If the rotor has only 26 positions on it, one for each letter, then all messages will have a (repeating) key 26 letters long. Although the key itself (mostly hidden in the wiring of the rotor) might not be known,
7102-415: The language during World War II. In early 1942, Johnston met with the commanding general of the Amphibious Corps, Major General Clayton B. Vogel , and his staff. Johnston staged simulated combat conditions, demonstrating that Navajo men could transmit and decode a three-line message in 20 seconds, compared to the 30 minutes it took the machines of the time. The idea of using Navajo speakers as code talkers
7208-417: The letter A would make the bulb labelled Q light up. However, the wiring is fixed, providing little security. Rotor machines change the interconnecting wiring with each key stroke. The wiring is placed inside a rotor, and then rotated with a gear every time a letter is pressed. So while pressing A the first time might generate a Q , the next time it might generate a J . Every letter pressed on
7314-442: The machine and having the operator select a random 5-character string for each new message. This was then encrypted to produce the interior indicator. Army key lists included an initial setting for the rotors that was used to encrypt the random string. The Navy operators used the keyboard to increment the code rotors until they matched the random character string. The alphabet rotor would move during this process and their final position
7420-410: The machine easier to build, resulting in the Electric Code Machine Mark II (or ECM Mark II ), which the navy then produced as the CSP-889 (or 888). Oddly, the Army was unaware of either the changes or the mass production of the system, but were "let in" on the secret in early 1940. In 1941 the Army and Navy joined in a joint cryptographic system, based on the machine. The Army then started using it as
7526-429: The machine. After the death of Scherbius in 1929, Willi Korn was in charge of further technical development of Enigma. As with other early rotor machine efforts, Scherbius had limited commercial success. However, the German armed forces, responding in part to revelations that their codes had been broken during World War I, adopted the Enigma to secure their communications. The Reichsmarine adopted Enigma in 1926, and
7632-457: The methods for attacking these types of ciphers don't need that information. So while such a single rotor machine is certainly easy to use, it is no more secure than any other partial polyalphabetic cipher system. But this is easy to correct. Simply stack more rotors next to each other, and gear them together. After the first rotor spins "all the way", make the rotor beside it spin one position. Now you would have to type 26 × 26 = 676 letters (for
7738-501: The mid-15th century, a new technique was invented by Alberti , now known generally as polyalphabetic ciphers , which recognised the virtue of using more than a single substitution alphabet; he also invented a simple technique for "creating" a multitude of substitution patterns for use in a message. Two parties exchanged a small amount of information (referred to as the key ) and used it to create many substitution alphabets, and so many different substitutions for each plaintext letter over
7844-415: The military and veterans' service." A statement by a Navajo Nation Council Delegate and comments by Pata and Begaye, among others, objected to Trump's remarks during the event, including his use "once again ... [of] the word Pocahontas in a negative way towards a political adversary Elizabeth Warren who claims 'Native American heritage'." The National Congress of American Indians objected to Trump's use of
7950-437: The motion of the rotors. His modification consisted of a paper tape reader from a teletype machine attached to a small device with metal "feelers" positioned to pass electricity through the holes. When a letter was pressed on the keyboard the signal would be sent through the rotors as it was in the Enigma, producing an encrypted version. In addition, the current would also flow through the paper tape attachment, and any holes in
8056-569: The need for a cipher system that could be used by all Allied forces. This functionality was achieved in three different ways. Firstly, the ECM Adapter (CSP 1000), which could be retrofitted on Allied cipher machines, was produced at the Washington Naval Yard ECM Repair Shop. A total of 3,500 adapters were produced. The second method was to adapt the SIGABA for interoperation with a modified British machine,
8162-425: The outputs were "gathered up" into five groups as well — that is all the letters from A to E would be wired together for instance. That way the five signals on the input side would be randomized through the rotors, and come out the far side with power in one of five lines. Now the movement of the rotors could be controlled with a day code, and the paper tape was eliminated. They referred to the combination of machines as
8268-411: The rotor machine was ultimately made famous by Arthur Scherbius , who filed a rotor machine patent in 1918. Scherbius later went on to design and market the Enigma machine . The most widely known rotor cipher device is the German Enigma machine used during World War II, of which there were a number of variants. The standard Enigma model, Enigma I, used three rotors. At the end of the stack of rotors
8374-418: The rotors and to zeroize the machine. The O position turned the machine off. The P setting was used to print the indicators and date/time groups on the output tape. It was the only mode that printed numbers. No printing took place in the R setting, but digit keys were active to increment rotors. During encryption, the Z key was connected to the X key and the space bar produced a Z input to the alphabet maze. A Z
8480-438: The same settings recovers the original message (see involution ). The concept of a rotor machine occurred to a number of inventors independently at a similar time. In 2003, it emerged that the first inventors were two Dutch naval officers , Theo A. van Hengel (1875–1939) and R. P. C. Spengler (1875–1955) in 1915 (De Leeuw, 2003). Previously, the invention had been ascribed to four inventors working independently and at much
8586-571: The same time: Edward Hebern , Arvid Damm , Hugo Koch and Arthur Scherbius . In the United States Edward Hugh Hebern built a rotor machine using a single rotor in 1917. He became convinced he would get rich selling such a system to the military, the Hebern Rotor Machine , and produced a series of different machines with one to five rotors. His success was limited, however, and he went bankrupt in
8692-401: The signal paths through the alphabet maze between the encryption and decryption modes. The long “controller” switch was mounted vertically, with its knob on the top of the housing. See image. It had five positions, O, P, R, E and D. Besides encrypt (E) and decrypt (D), it had a plain text position (P) that printed whatever was typed on the output tape, and a reset position (R) that was used to set
8798-668: The skill, speed, and accuracy they demonstrated throughout the war. At the Battle of Iwo Jima , Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, had six Navajo code talkers working around the clock during the first two days of the battle. These six sent and received over 800 messages, all without error. Connor later said, "Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima." After incidents where Navajo code talkers were mistaken for ethnic Japanese and were captured by other American soldiers, several were assigned
8904-694: The special training required to qualify as Code Talkers. Their service records indicated "642 – Code Talker" as a duty assignment. Today, the term Code Talker is still strongly associated with the bilingual Navajo speakers trained in the Navajo Code during World War II by the US Marine Corps to serve in all six divisions of the Corps and the Marine Raiders of the Pacific theater . However,
9010-620: The substitution alphabet(s) in use in a mono-alphabetic substitution cipher . For instance, in English, the plaintext letters E, T, A, O, I, N and S, are usually easy to identify in ciphertext on the basis that since they are very frequent, their corresponding ciphertext letters will also be as frequent. In addition, bigram combinations like NG, ST and others are also very frequent, while others are rare indeed (Q followed by anything other than U for instance). The simplest frequency analysis relies on one ciphertext letter always being substituted for
9116-662: The substitution. By this means, a rotor machine produces a complex polyalphabetic substitution cipher, which changes with every key press. In classical cryptography , one of the earliest encryption methods was the simple substitution cipher , where letters in a message were systematically replaced using some secret scheme. Monoalphabetic substitution ciphers used only a single replacement scheme — sometimes termed an "alphabet"; this could be easily broken, for example, by using frequency analysis . Somewhat more secure were schemes involving multiple alphabets, polyalphabetic ciphers . Because such schemes were implemented by hand, only
9222-527: The system base and the code-wheel assembly, but there was one incident where a unit was lost for a time. On February 3, 1945, a truck carrying a SIGABA system in three safes was stolen while its guards were visiting a brothel in recently liberated Colmar, France . General Eisenhower ordered an extensive search, which finally discovered the safes six weeks later in a nearby river. The need for cooperation among US, British, and Canadian forces in carrying out joint military operations against Axis forces gave rise to
9328-446: The system being used and the security classification and an interior indicator that determined the initial settings of the code and alphabet rotors. The key list included separate index rotor settings for each security classification. This prevented lower classification messages from being used as cribs to attack higher classification messages. The Navy and Army had different procedures for the interior indicator. Both started by zeroizing
9434-501: The tape at its current location would cause the corresponding rotor to turn, and then advance the paper tape one position. In comparison, the Enigma rotated its rotors one position with each key press, a much less random movement. The resulting design went into limited production as the M-134 Converter , and its message settings included the position of the tape and the settings of a plugboard that indicated which line of holes on
9540-446: The tape controlled which rotors. However, there were problems using fragile paper tapes under field conditions. Friedman's associate, Frank Rowlett , then came up with a different way to advance the rotors, using another set of rotors. In Rowlett's design, each rotor must be constructed such that between one and four output signals were generated, advancing one or more of the rotors (rotors normally have one output for every input). There
9646-582: The use of Native American communicators pre-dates WWII. Early pioneers of Native American-based communications used by the US Military include the Cherokee , Choctaw , and Lakota peoples during World War I. Today the term Code Talker includes military personnel from all Native American communities who have contributed their language skills in service to the United States. Other Native American communicators—now referred to as code talkers—were deployed by
9752-549: Was crazy white man . Two Comanche code talkers were assigned to each regiment, and the remainder were assigned to the 4th Infantry Division headquarters. The Comanche began transmitting messages shortly after landing on Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Some were wounded but none killed. In 1989, the French government awarded the Comanche code talkers the Chevalier of the National Order of Merit . On November 30, 1999,
9858-431: Was "reflected" back through the disks before going to the lamps. The advantage of this was that there was nothing that had to be done to the setup in order to decipher a message; the machine was "symmetrical". The Enigma's reflector guaranteed that no letter could be enciphered as itself, so an A could never turn back into an A . This helped Polish and, later, British efforts to break the cipher. ( See Cryptanalysis of
9964-455: Was accepted; Vogel recommended that the Marines recruit 200 Navajo. However, that recommendation was cut to one-platoon to use as a pilot project to develop and test the feasibility of a code. On May 4, 1942, twenty-nine Navajo men were sworn into service at an old US Army Fort converted into a BIA Boarding School: Fort Wingate . They were organized as Platoon 382. The first 29 Navajo recruits attended boot camp in May 1942. This first group created
10070-403: Was an additional, non-rotating disk, the "reflector," wired such that the input was connected electrically back out to another contact on the same side and thus was "reflected" back through the three-rotor stack to produce the ciphertext . When current was sent into most other rotor cipher machines, it would travel through the rotors and out the other side to the lamps. In the Enigma, however, it
10176-529: Was awarded posthumously to 18 Choctaw code talkers for their World War II service on September 17, 2007, by the Adjutant General of the State of Texas. The Code Talkers Recognition Act of 2008 (Public Law 110–420) was signed into law by President George W. Bush on November 15, 2008. The act recognized every Native American code talker who served in the United States military during WWI or WWII (except
10282-412: Was determined that phonetically spelling out all military terms letter by letter into words while in combat would be too time-consuming, some terms , concepts , tactics , and instruments of modern warfare were given uniquely formal descriptive nomenclatures in Navajo. For example, the word for shark referred to a destroyer, while silver oak leaf indicated the rank of lieutenant colonel. A codebook
10388-538: Was developed to teach new initiates the many relevant words and concepts. The text was for classroom purposes only and was never to be taken into the field. The code talkers memorized all these variations and practiced their rapid use under stressful conditions during training. Navajo speakers who had not been trained in the code work would have no idea what the code talkers' messages meant; they would hear only truncated and disjointed strings of individual, unrelated nouns and verbs. The Navajo code talkers were commended for
10494-753: Was during World War I. Cherokee soldiers of the US 30th Infantry Division fluent in the Cherokee language were assigned to transmit messages while under fire during the Second Battle of the Somme . According to the Division Signal Officer, this took place in September 1918 when their unit was under British command. During World War I , company commander Captain Lawrence of the US Army overheard Solomon Louis and Mitchell Bobb having
10600-497: Was informal and directly translated from English into the Indigenous language. Code talkers used short, descriptive phrases if there was no corresponding word in the Indigenous language for the military word. For example, the Navajo did not have a word for submarine , so they translated it as iron fish . The term Code Talker was originally coined by the United States Marine Corps and used to identify individuals who completed
10706-453: Was little money for encryption development in the US before the war, so Friedman and Rowlett built a series of "add on" devices called the SIGGOO (or M-229) that were used with the existing M-134s in place of the paper tape reader. These were external boxes containing a three rotor setup in which five of the inputs were live, as if someone had pressed five keys at the same time on an Enigma, and
10812-525: Was never broken. There were two code types used during World War II. Type one codes were formally developed based on the languages of the Comanche , Hopi , Meskwaki , and Navajo peoples. They used words from their languages for each letter of the English alphabet. Messages could be encoded and decoded by using a simple substitution cipher where the ciphertext was the Native language word. Type two code
10918-464: Was nowhere near as practical a device as the Enigma, which was smaller and lighter than the radios with which it was used. It found widespread use in the radio rooms of US Navy ships, but as a result of these practical problems the SIGABA simply couldn't be used in the field. In most theatres other systems were used instead, especially for tactical communications. One of the most famous was the use of Navajo code talkers for tactical field communications in
11024-407: Was printed as a space on decryption. The reader was expected to understand that a word like “xebra” in a decrypted message was actually “zebra.” The printer automatically added a space between each group of five characters during encryption. The SIGABA was zeroized when all the index rotors read zero in their low order digit and all the alphabet and code rotors were set to the letter O. Each rotor had
11130-442: Was similar to the Enigma in basic theory, in that it used a series of rotors to encipher every character of the plaintext into a different character of ciphertext. Unlike Enigma's three rotors however, the SIGABA included fifteen, and did not use a reflecting rotor. The SIGABA had three banks of five rotors each; the action of two of the banks controlled the stepping of the third. The SIGABA advanced one or more of its main rotors in
11236-444: Was the internal indicator. In case of joint operations, the Army procedures were followed. The key lists included a “26-30” check string. After the rotors were reordered according to the current key, the operator would zeroize the machine, encrypt 25 characters and then encrypt “AAAAA”. The ciphertext resulting from the five A's had to match the check string. The manual warned that typographical errors were possible in key lists and that
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