Cryptologic Quarterly is an in-house journal for NSA. Some of the issues have been declassified and are available to the public at a couple different sites, one of which is the Center for Cryptologic History (slash NSA archives), and the other is in the NSA.gov Helpful links area (check out the section on individual articles). I’ve been able to find six full issues, and I’ll consider looking at the individual articles if I have the time and interest (some of them are just of internal operational interest, like changing management approaches, and nothing I really care about).
Images used for educational purposes only.
Cryptologic Quarterly #33, 2014-1
Cover: Photo of monument to Marian Rejewski in Bydgoszcz, Poland, with sculpture of the ENIGMA machine he reconstructed.
Renaissance Cryptography, Occultism, and the Jewish Cabala
... by Erin Higgins
The Dawn of American Communications Intelligence: The Spanish-American War and After
... by David A. Hatch
NSA’s Senior Technical Development Program Turns Twenty
... by Nancy Welker and Cathleen L. Civiello
Farmhouse Field Station Houlton, Maine: The U.S. Army’s First Fixed Field Site
... by Betsy Rohaly Smoot
The Thought behind High-Level Cryptological Discovery, 1930-1945
... by Peter W. Donovan
Renaissance Cryptography, Occultism, and the Jewish Cabala
This is a look at Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, more commonly known as Agrippa (1486-1535), contemporary of Johannes Trithemius. Erin’s contention is that while both Trithemius and Agrippa clothed their treatises on cryptography in the form of cabalism and mysticism, at least with Trithemius it has been proven to just be a ploy. Agrippa, in De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres (1503) however, was still seen as an occultist, which Erin considers unfair.
The article is then an attempt to put Agrippa into context along with Trithemius, Porta and Vigenere, and to show that his use of the Hebrew alphabet was actually an early form of polyalphabetic substitution. Several pages are dedicated to the algorithm used for generating the tables for each of the substitution alphabets, much along the lines of what we see as the modern day Porta cipher.
The Dawn of American Communications Intelligence: The Spanish-American War and After
This is a chapter excerpt from David Hatch’s The Dawn of American Cryptology, which was still in progress at the time. There seem to have been a few changes prior to the final publication of the article, including a photo of Colonel Parker Hitt that got dropped.
(Parker Hitt)
NSA’s Senior Technical Development Program Turns Twenty
Article on the management and training program used at NSA. Useful if you’re in HR.
Farmhouse Field Station Houlton, Maine: The U.S. Army’s First Fixed Field Site
Betsy Smoot has a strong interest in WW 1 history, and that shows up here in this article on Station Houlton, which as the title states was the location for the U.S. Army’s first fixed radio station. Houlton had a short, on-and-off life between 1918 and 1920. While the Army had mobile radio receivers in jeeps or trucks along the Texas-Mexico border, it was felt that the U.S. should listen in to German broadcasts, if possible. The best site at the time was identified as a farm in Houlton, Maine. The War Department’s Military Intelligence Division leased the land, and brought up some of the radio equipment and a few of the men from one of the mobile units and got to work constructing the receiver and tower.
Almost immediately, the Navy objected, claiming that land-based fixed radio belonged to their jurisdiction and demanded that the Army shut down Houlton. As a stopgap, Houlton turned into a kind of experimental radio measurements lab, testing how atmospheric conditions affected reception. Pretty soon though, the Navy lost interest in German intercept, and the Army took that over, but the conflict between the two groups never really ended.
p. 44 – “On December 12, likely while listening for Chapultepec, Houlton intercepted fourteen cipher messages sent by Berlin to Madrid. These messages were forwarded to MI-8 where by December 19 John Matthews Manly, Yardley’s second-in-command, had deciphered seven of them, a total of 720 words. Manly felt that it was of the “highest importance that these messages be obtained daily and transmitted here without delay. They come from the heart of Germany and are the confidential communications of a minister to his home government.”
p. 45 – We get a repeat of the story where the MID Radio Intelligence Service (RIS) mixed up orders from the Signal Corps for an intercept station in Omsk, Russia, thinking that men from the RIS would be shipped to Siberia. This misunderstanding eventually gets cleared up, but it does embarrass Houlton and the RIS.
p. 49 – MI-8 is getting intercept again, with 98 messages total, and 19 decoded. They’re mostly diplomatic traffic.
p. 52 – By late April, 1920, Yardley had set up the Black Chamber in New York, and Houlton was instructed to send traffic there; by mail for normal messages, telegraph for important codes. However, Houlton had a lot of problems at that point, from bills not being paid by MID, rent on the farm being skipped, men having to buy supplies out of pocket and not getting reimbursed, having to work in deep snow in the winter, and the men being bored out of their minds with unrelated experiment measurements. The last of the traffic was copied either in April or May, 1920, and control of the station reverted to MID. The lease ended in June and wasn’t renewed. The remnants of Houlton were transferred “to the Signal Corps in the newly created 1st Corps area under the First Army.”
The Thought behind High-Level Cryptological Discovery, 1930-1945
I’m not really sure how to describe Peter W. Donovan’s goals here. The intro blurb states “In this Schorreck Memorial Lecture of May 2013, some of the key Allied discoveries in World War II cryptology, particularly Pacific War cryptology, are discussed from the mathematical and psychological viewpoints.” It takes the form of 14 short episodes, and looks obliquely at the math side of each issue.
1. Data Processing and Communications
Moving from tabulators to actual electronic computers
2. A Junior Cryptologist of the Era
Mentioning Irene Brion, and her Lady GI, where she wrote about her three years in the Army as a cryptologist. In one anecdote, apparently when she was in San Miguel at the end of the war, “the contractor providing laundry services returned washed underclothing separated by pieces of paper that turned out to be pages of a Japanese Army codebook still in use in China. These were exploited for the last few weeks of hostilities.”
3. Andrew Hodges on “The Military Use of Alan Turing”
The need to avoid “blunders” when using a particular system. In this case, simple things like stamping rifles with serial numbers and cities of manufacture is information that can be analyzed in a random sample to obtain estimates of production capabilities and troop movements.
4. Henri Poincaré’s Science et Méthode (Paris, 1914)
The importance of being able to get away from a problem to let your mind make unexpected connections for that “Eureka” moment.
5. The Polish Cipher Bureau and ENIGMA, 1930-1939
Mathematician Marian Rejewski and the Polish Cipher Bureau’s attacks against weaknesses in the Enigma machine. The point here is to avoid unintentionally giving away information on your system. The mistake was that with a 3-position Enigma machine with 5 rotors, the operators used all 5 rotors in all three positions across multiple messages, disclosing the wiring for each one. Instead, the wiser option would have been to always use rotors 1 or 2 for the right-most position, and rotors 3, 4 and 5 for the middle and left-most positions.
6. Initial Breaching of JN-25 at Bletchley Park, 1939
John Tiltman’s attack on the JN-25A’s superencipherment of the 5-digit cipher system. Agnes Driscoll also worked on the book groups for the Water Transport Code, but apparently failed to see how Tiltman’s approach could be used for decipherment.
7. Turing’s Work on JN-25A and Bayesian Inference, 1939-1941
Using logarithmic Bayesian probability theory for attacking seemingly flat frequency distributions, and commenting on how close Turing was to inventing Information Theory as later pioneered by Claude Shannon.
8. Turing’s Work on Naval ENIGMA
There’s very little background on this story, and the emphasis is on Hilton’s dictum “they did not have the people there who could envisage the things that we would be trying to do.” (That is, the Allies slid cribs across the enciphered messages to find places where letters didn’t encrypt to themselves (i.e. – a != A).)
9. Reconstruction of the “PURPLE” Diplomatic Cipher Machine
Covering Frank Rowlett’s attack on Purple, aided by the Japanese Embassy in Washington encrypting messages that were word-for-word repetitions of State Department letters issued in English.
10. Fish and Bill Tutte
A very short example of Tutte’s attack on Fish, an encrypted 5-line teletype machine cipher.
11. The Indicators of Cipher 2468
More examples of the weaknesses in the Japanese Water Transport System codes.
12. The Characteristic Distribution and Mamba
There’s no description of Mamba, but the code in question seems to be JN-25. The “characteristic” is the remainder of the summation of the digits of a number mod 10. That is, the sum of the 5-digit code 95134 is 22, mod 10 gives a characteristic of “2”. Looking at the total characteristics for all of the code groups in a message showed that “4” occurred the most often at 17.6%, followed by “7” at 14.5%, while “6” and “9” both trailed at 2.8%.
13. Modern Computer Calculations
Using modern computers to determine whether a potential solution is “correct.” Seems to be a proposal for using hillclimbing against JN-25, but I may be wrong.
14. A Highly Contrived Example for Mathematicians Only
Using 5-digit “groups as transmitted” (GATs) to show a mathematical weakness in JN-25, and suggest a way of strengthening it.
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Assessment:
Renaissance Cryptography, Occultism, and the Jewish Cabala
Kind of obscure and may only appeal to historians.
The Dawn of American Communications Intelligence: The Spanish-American War and After
Good for a couple photos. Otherwise, read the completed book.
NSA’s Senior Technical Development Program Turns Twenty
Skippable
Farmhouse Field Station Houlton, Maine: The U.S. Army’s First Fixed Field Site
Good if you want more information on radio intercept activities during WW I. Kind of a supplement to Smoot’s From the Ground Up.
The Thought behind High-Level Cryptological Discovery, 1930-1945
Hit and miss. Contains some good information on the weaknesses of Axis systems during WW II and how math can be used to identify and exploit them. But, the inclusion of information from Irene Brion, and a photo of mathematician Emmy Nöther, feel gratuitous.
The Black Chamber 