Reply To: Encryption � A Simple But Practically Unbreakable Trick

ZachKessin-

The method described in the original post is basically the one-time pad (or one-time code pad) encryption technique. It’s very simple, but still pretty much unbreakable, simply because it’s variable and doesn’t provide a large enough sample to decipher. I guess you could say it’s similar to Enigma in that both use varying substitutions, but they’re really not at all the same – the Enigma was a mechanical device.

The stories of how Germany’s Enigma and Japan’s Purple were cracked are very interesting.

The effort to crack Enigma had two prongs – the Bletchley Park computers were working to decrypt it, and others were trying to capture a machine intact. Both groups succeeded. Polish codebreakers actually get the credit for first cracking Enigma.

U.S. codebreakers cracked Purple, but they kept this to themselves for a while, and let Japan go on thinking their encoded messages were secure. When the U.S. intercepted a message about a long flight that Isoroku Yamamato, Japans foremost military strategist and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, would be aboard, it was time to finally tip their hand. A successful long-range intercept of his flight by P-38 fighters resulted in Yamamato’s plane being shot down, and Yamamato was killed.