Basic Cryptanalysis

While surfing Stu Savory's blog, I found an interesting link to a publication on the University of Michigan website.

The US Army Field manual of Cryptography discribes several WW2 field encryption methodes and their cryptanalysis. If you want to learn using field ciphers, or would like to break them, you should browse through this field manual.

Uncyclopedia

Everyone knows Wikipedia, the free internet encyclopedia, running on Wiki software. Its success has inspired some people, begin 2005, to create their own Wiki site, Uncyclopedia.

Although it looks almost identical to Wikipedia, its goal is to provide us 'information' with lots of humor, nonsense and above all, totally ridiculous stuff. Where Wikipedia's foundations are build on the NPOV, Neutral Point Of View, Uncyclopedia requires that the articles are written in a SPOV, or Satirical Point of View.

To give you an idea, Wikipedia's "This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it." was translated into "This article is a stub. The article submitter may also have been smoking crack. You can help Uncyclopedia by expanding it."

Although some articles are completely ridiculous crap - actually, all of them are - there are many hilarious pieces. Check out George Bush or other well know persons, or surf through the most Best of pages.

Simon Singh's Crypto Corner

If you're a newbie on crypto, I can recommend Simon's Crypto Corner. Simon is author, journalist and TV producer, specialising in science and mathematics. He wrote some interesting books on mathematics and the history of cryptology.

The Code Book describes the complete history of cryptology, without going into technical details. Great book to get a view on how cryptography developed. There's even a free downloadable CD version from the book. You can try out letter frequency analysis on Vigenere, play with the Enigma internal etc. On the site's interactive Black Chamber, he explains all ancient and classical ciphers, how they are used, and how they were broken. You can also test your code breaking skils.

NSA Career Expo

On September 14, the National Security Agency, America's cryptologic organization, will hold a career expo in Hawaii. Chief Spook has a green light to hire every year about 1500 people through 2008, to achieve his Strategic Plan 2004-2009.

Their mission becomes increasingly challenging and this requires more and very specialized personnel. NSA is searching for computer scientists, cryptanalysts , signals analysts, computer and electrical engineers, mathematicians and a wide variety of analysts. NSA hopes to attract the best and the brightest amongst us to improve NSA's capabilities. If you think making and breaking codes is your kind of job, take a peek at the career pages.

The Tolkachev Story

Adolf Tolkachev

At the CIA's Studies in Intelligence web pages, I came across the Cold War story of Adolf Tolkachev, a military aviation electronics expert.

Over a period of nine years, he provided the CIA with a large amount of highly sensitive information on Soviet avionics, cruise missiles, and other secret technologies. In 1985, Tolkachev was arrested while trying to pass secret materials to the Americans. Tolkachev was executed in 1986 by the Soviets for high treason.

The report gives an inside story on why and how he defected, his motivation, the first contacts with the CIA in Moscow, the Agent communications and many other details. It shows how Tolkachev took ever larger risks, got into trouble, the exfiltration planning, how he was compromised and finally arrested by the Soviets.

This story gives a good view on the dangerous life and trade craft of secret agents. The complete story is found at Tolkachev, A Worthy Successor to Penkovsky.

More interesting publications are found at CIA's Studies in Intelligence.

Update: in 2015, the complete story of Tolkachev was writting in David E Hoffman's compelling book The Billion Dollar Spy. For more details, read my book review.