By Tom Espiner, 19 November 2007 08:44
NEWS
In an ironic twist, a team from the UK operating a World War II codebreaking computer has been beaten in a cipher-breaking contest by a German.
In the Cipher Challenge, a competition run by the National Museum of Computing last week, the cipher-breaking computer Colossus had to decode encrypted radio communications intercepted from Paderborn in Germany. Competing against Colossus, which took 14 years to rebuild, were radio enthusiasts from across Europe, who had to beat the WWII codecracker using whatever computing means they had at their disposal.
The winner was Joachim Schüth, from Bonn, who completed the task using software he wrote himself.
The museum's spokesperson said: "[Schüth] cracked the most difficult code yesterday. We're absolutely delighted. He used specially written software for the challenge. Colossus is still chugging away, as we got the signals late. Yesterday the atmospheric conditions were such that we couldn't get good signals."
The team operating Colossus managed to intercept the radio signals early on Friday, before loading the paper tape containing the encoded cipher stream. At the time of writing, the tape was still running, and the team expected to break the cipher later on Friday.
Schüth had "been much quicker and done a stunningly good job", said the museum's spokesperson. Few technical details were available at the time of writing about the systems or software used to break the cipher, although the spokesperson said Schüth had used the Ada programming language. Ada is used for military systems and was created by the US Department of Defense in 1980.
Anthony Sale, the head of the team which rebuilt Colossus, said the transmitted text had been encrypted using a Lorenz teleprinter cipher machine, the same type of machine which was used by Germany for high-level communications in WWII.
Tom Espiner writes for ZDNet.co.uk
Comments
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1. Graham Coles
Reporting a bit off track here, is this an advert for ada or something.
No mention of the hardware used, because presumably it's irrelevant?
If a valve operated colossus (operating at a few thousand characters per second) can beat a modern multi-core, multi-gigahertz supercomputer (operating at god only knows how many billions of ops/sec) I would be more than a little surprised.
The fact that the program was written in ada is meaningless. It's like a formula-1 racing driver beating a ford model T then saying it was all due to the brand of sunglasses he was wearing.
2. anonymous
So a radio signal, sent by a German from Germany, was 'cracked' by a....
... German.
It's 'Jeux Sans Frontieres' all over again, isn't it?
3. Karen Challinor
erm using what hardware ?
if they used punch paper tape or cards, plugboards, mechanical switches and thermionic valve technology in a device similar to collossus then I'm very impressed indeed
if on the other hand they use a modern desktop computer with a hard drive, more ram than a hundred collossi and a processor that can measure it's speed in an integer number of megaflops then I'm slightly less than impressed
it probably took longer to transcribe the signal to paper tape than it took the german guy to decode it