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To those with an interest in the world of intelligence in general, and naval intelligence in particular, Reginald Hall needs little or no introduction. As the director of British Naval Intelligence...

The Squire Law Library has designed and run a series of popular escape room-style events, aimed at masters and undergraduate law students. Intended to prompt students to explore the full range of legal resources available to them, the games typically challenge participants to open a locked safe: relying on legal databases, the library catalogue and print materials to decipher a six-digit combination. This article, based on Lizz Edwards-Waller's presentation at the BIALL (virtual) conference 2020, reflects on the practicalities of running and promoting code-breaking events within the library and considers the benefits of this style of event in addition to, or instead of, more traditional law library orientation tours.

In this essay, which began as a Review Article of the book X, Y & Z: The Real Story of How Enigma was Broken by Dermot Turing, I discuss some of the background details of the Enigma Cypher Machine. The machine was supposed to be ‘unbreakable’, as claimed (in particular) by the manufacturers. It was repeatedly broken by Polish and British mathematicians, employed in their respective countries’ (and France’s) bureaus; in particular, heroically, by Alan Turing (at Bletchley Park, UK) and Marian Rejewski (in Poznań, Warsaw and France) — but others played important parts, too.

The experience in the cryptanalysis field shows that evaluating the security level of a cryptosystem involves not only understanding the mathematical concept, but also applying the best possible cryptographic attacks on this cryptosystem by using the best available techniques. By applying the appropriate attack on the appropriate hardware platform, we can determine the security limits of the studied cryptographic algorithm, and this will enable us to recommend adjustments to the related parameters of this algorithm. On the other hand, although ordinary computers are capable of performing security services, cryptanalytical tasks may require massive computations that go beyond the capabilities of the available computing platforms and this raises the need of using high-performance platforms. In this paper, we will present a comparison between the most popular high-performance computing systems used to perform cryptanalytical tasks. This study will be of a particular interest to researchers who are interested in using high-performance computing units for testing cryptographic systems.

This chapter provides an overview of current computer technology with potential applications to text analysis. Quantitative analyses of textual materials have benefitted from computing technology as long as that technology has been available. In fact, some of the earliest computers were designed specifically to support text analysis for code breaking during World War II. Although a scanned bit-mapped image itself is in machine-readable form and can be printed out in a form of high-technology copying, it must be converted into a collection of text characters to be useful for content analysis. The advantages of database technology for text applications are so great that some vendors have developed what are referred to as document management systems—systems that offer database features tailored specifically to text and related materials. In some text analyses no preprocessing is performed, leaving all extraction to be performed on the original text.

Alexander Guthrie (known as “Alastair” and later as “AGD”) Denniston was born on 1 December 1881 in Greenock, Scotland. Biographies1 do not seem to agree on his education; however, all seem to agre...

Alexander (Alastair) Guthrie Denniston was the operational head of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), the British codebreaking organisation, from its establishment in 1919 until Februar...

Code Breaking in the Pacific is an essential reference for anyone studying Allied code breaking in the Pacific Theater of World War II.Having said that, it should be noted that this is a book that ...

High performance Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices have the capability of implementing parallel computing by building parallel Processing Elements (PEs) called virtual processors. One important reason is that FPGAs are special purpose devices. Hence, implementing any system based on these devices will give faster and more precise results than those given by using PCs, even if parallel processing approaches been applied by PCs. In this paper, two systems based on FPGA devices have been built for High Performance Computing (HPC). Code breaking for Simplified Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm was depended as case study. The first system consists of one FPGA device operated in a sequential way. One FPGA device contains one PE works in sequential fashion. This PE represents one simplified DES algorithm with two complete rounds. While the second system is a parallel one, also it consists of one FPGA device, but programmed to be implemented in parallel manner. The FPGA device contains 512 PEs operated in a parallel fashion. Each PE represents two completed rounds of simplified DES algorithm. In the second system, FPGA device works in much higher speed than the first one, because of that it works in parallel manner. Hence, reflecting great effect toward reducing the code breaking time and providing better results.

Neurodiversity in engineering can be supported by encouraging all college capable students to consider engineering as a major. Many students who learn differently may not see themselves attending college and if they do see themselves in college they may not consider studying engineering. This past summer Aurora University in partnership with Landmark College held a summer residential program for students with Autism Spectrum Disorder to experience college including living away from home, academic work and afternoon activities both academic and recreational. Many of the afternoon activities explored engineering. These included robotics, code breaking, running a NASA mission to Mars and observing the night sky with telescopes at Yerkes observatory. The instructors and the parent evaluations can both attest to the growth of the students during the program. This paper will discuss the structure of the activities, the response of the students to these activities and the overall response of the parents to the program. It will conclude with a reflection on how as a community we might increase our diversity by including more learning styles in our programs.

Part 1: WCC 2018 Plenary Contributions: Keynote, Special Sessions; International audience; The story of the Allied breaking of the German Enigma codes in World War 2 was first published in the 1970s. Even now many of the details, especially concerning the critical work in the 1930s undertaken by gifted and dedicated Polish codebreakers remains largely unknown. Their work is credited with saving the Allies several years work and so shortening the war and saving thousands of lives. The holding of the IFIP World Computer Congress in Poznan, home of the Polish codebreakers, gave an opportunity for their work to be highlighted to an international audience. Talks covering the work of the Polish, British and French codebreakers were given and webcast worldwide. In addition, a encoded Enigma message was sent at the start of the day from Poznan to Bletchley Park in the UK where the volunteers of the Bombe team at The National Museum of Computing successfully confirmed their breaking of the message at the start of the afternoon session.

Los éxitos de Broadway han sido una de las principales fuentes de inspiración para Hollywood. En los años cuarenta, Tennessee Williams ocupó el espacio hegemónico de Eugene O’Neill, y sus potentes temas y personajes interesaron rápidamente a Hollywood. A principios de los cincuenta, el férreo Código Hays censuró varios aspectos sexuales de sus exitosas adaptaciones fílmicas, pero la presencia de personajes homosexuales resultó muy novedosa. Siguiendo esta tendencia, se adaptaron en estos años los dramas de Robert Anderson y de Lillian Hellman que los trataban. Con el objetivo de incidir en el impacto de los seres de ficción de esta orientación en Hollywood, se analizarán como persona y como rol –según Francesco Casetti y Federico di Chio-, los protagonistas de Té y simpatía (1956), La gata sobre el tejado de zinc (1958) y La calumnia (1961). Este trabajo intenta reflexionar sobre cómo los personajes de Anderson, Williams y Hellman, respectivamente, contribuyeron al aperturismo temático en Hollywood, a la fractura del Código Hays y a la evolución del melodrama clásico entre 1951 y 1961. The success of Broadway have been one of the main sources of inspiration for Hollywood. In the 1940s, Tennessee Williams took hegemonic space of Eugene O’Neill, so their powerful themes and characters interested quickly to Hollywood. At the beginning of the 1950s, the strict Hays Code censored some sexual aspects of their successful film adaptations, but the presence of homosexual characters was very novel. Following this trend, Robert Anderson and Lillian Hellman dramas that treated them were adapted in these years. With the aim to influence the impact of characters of this orientation in Hollywood, will be analysed as a person and as a role –according to Francesco Casetti and Federico di Chio- , the protagonists of Tea and Sympathy (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and The Children Hour (1961). This work tries to reflect how the characters of Anderson, Williams and Hellman, respectively, contributed to openness theme in Hollywood, the Hays Code breaking and the evolution of the classic melodrama between 1951 and 1961

The team at Bletchley Park in England played an important role in breaking the Enigma and Lorenz codes during the Second World War, and their code-breaking work contributed to the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Enigma codes were used by the Germans in the transmission of naval messages to their submarines in the Atlantic and were designed to ensure that any unauthorized interception of the messages would be unintelligible to a third party. The British built a machine (called the Bombe) to crack the Enigma codes, and they developed the Colossus computer to crack the Lorenz codes.

Cryptography can be defined as the art of secret writing or protecting information by transforming it (encrypting it) into an unreadable format, called cipher text and then transmitting it across insecure networks, so that it cannot be read by anyone except the intended recipient. Only those who possess a secret key can decipher (or decrypt) the message into plain text. Encrypted information can sometimes be broken by cryptanalysis, also called code breaking, although modern cryptography techniques are virtually unbreakable. Various algorithms help achieve flawless encryption results which are mostly unbreakable. This paper is an attempt to improve one such algorithm, i.e. RC6 by adding on to its existing functionalities.

This chapter provides an overview of research and theory around contemporary multimodal texts and reading. It explores some affordances of multimodal texts for developing English language learners' repertoires of reading. The chapter outlines some of the challenges for innovating practice in Asian English language teaching (ELT) contexts. It describes the four roles or areas of competence: code breaking (coding competence), meaning-making (semantic competence), text-user practices (pragmatic competence), and text-analyst practices (critical competence). The chapter provides some criteria for selecting texts, suggestions for addressing the four practices when teaching reading with multimodal texts, and assessment in multimodal reading. It discusses the ecology of English in Asian contexts, culture of learning in Asia, social and economic constraints, and ideology of text. In Asian contexts, such as China, Japan, and Thailand, it is a foreign language and studied as a school subject. Culture of learning captures a number of factors relevant to English language learning and teaching.

Studies on hacking have typically focused on motivational aspects and general personality traits of the individuals who engage in hacking; little systematic research has been conducted on predispositions that may be associated not only with the choice to pursue a hacking career but also with performance in either naïve or expert populations. Here, we test the hypotheses that two traits that are typically enhanced in autism spectrum disorders—attention to detail and systemizing—may be positively related to both the choice of pursuing a career in information security and skilled performance in a prototypical hacking task (i.e., crypto-analysis or code-breaking). A group of naïve participants and of ethical hackers completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient, including an attention to detail scale, and the Systemizing Quotient (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001, 2003). They were also tested with behavioral tasks involving code-breaking and a control task involving security X-ray image interpretation. Hackers reported significantly higher systemizing and attention to detail than non-hackers. We found a positive relation between self-reported systemizing (but not attention to detail) and code-breaking skills in both hackers and non-hackers, whereas attention to detail (but not systemizing) was related with performance in the X-ray screening task in both groups, as previously reported with naïve participants (Rusconi et al., 2015). We discuss the theoretical and translational implications of our findings.

This article is an attempt to assess the broad scope of communist Polish code breaking during the middle and late periods of the Cold War. Based on the recently released documents available now at the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, it portrays the ‘civilian’ intelligence codebreaking section's achievements and challenges, particularly between 1959 and 1989. The text suggests numerous successes of communist Polish codebreakers in defeating cryptosystems used by various European and non-European countries, particularly the Hagelin CX-52, and details the possible methods and tools utilized by Cold War Poles that facilitated the exploits. It proves that even a country with limited resources from behind the Iron Curtain can easily defeat strong cryptography.

Many students are intrigued by the idea of breaking secret codes. In the spring of 2011, the first KRYPTOS contest debuted and gave 49 undergraduate students from the Pacific Northwest a chance to test their cryptanalytic abilities. The contest consisted of three cipher challenges that students, working as individuals or in teams, tried to solve over a long weekend. In this paper, we describe the details of the contest including the code breaking challenges and their solutions.

It is rare to pick up a book on cryptologic history and read it straight through; for me, this is one of those rare books. Briggs was a codebreaker in Bletchley Park's Hut Six (German Army and Air ...

Anyone who is familiar with the codebreaking done by the British, the U.S Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (SIS), or the U.S Navy’s OP-20-G during World War II knows the important contributions m...

The article discusses a Cold War counterintelligence operation conducted by Polish and Soviet secret services against the Stepan Bandera Faction of the Ukrainian Nationalists Organization between 1959 and 1961. It emphasizes the methods implemented and used by communist security services, including signals intelligence, as well as the mistakes committed by the Ukrainian party. The article also briefs the measures related to code breaking employed during the operation.

We investigate the use of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to attack classical ciphers. MCMC has previously been used to break simple substitution ciphers. Here, we extend this approach to transposition ciphers and to substitution-plus-transposition ciphers. Our algorithms run quickly and perform fairly well even for key lengths as high as 40.