18 February, 2006

Herivel Tip

Bletchley Park has announced a forthcoming lecture by WWII veteran codebreaker John Herivel, a Hut 6 mathematician who, within weeks of arriving at BP, had come up with a nifty bit of lateral thinking to help solve Enigma. Dubbed the Herivel tip or Herivelismus, it relied on Enigma operators taking a shortcut and not randomising the rotors after having set up the machine. If you're interested, I wrote up the details in a Wikipedia article. It was Hut 6's lifeline for a few months in the Summer of 1940 after the Germans had changed their indicating procedure, obsoleting the Polish techniques then in use.

Herivel's tip reminded me of combination locks, of the type with rows of dials of digits. On university campus, I've noticed that many people in a hurry don't really scramble their combination locks (for cycles, normally) very thoroughly -- maybe a quick flick of the dials with the thumb, or something of that sort. As a result, the state after a half-hearted scramble still reveals information about the secret combination. I did some tests (on a lock of my own, of course), and if you observe several of these states, and you have a reasonably accurate model of what weak scrambling method is being used, you can whittle down the possibilities pretty quickly. Still, a good old-fashioned pair of bolt cutters is less hassle...

15 Comments:

Blogger fretboarder said...

Ah yes, I remember (3 years ago?) you thumb-twiddling that combination-lock of yours for hours on end, painstakingly writing down each resultant combination in a scrappy notebook... I think those toned thumb muscles also did wonders some of your bass-popping, though not for your PhD (How's that going these days?)

Btw, I enjoy your writing-style on this blog, reminds me also of your "Guide to kamikaze joy"...

10:00 pm  
Blogger Dirk Rijmenants said...

Or how intelligent operators can do stupid things...As Army Signal, I must say that people still didn't learn their lessons today, and keep on producing horrific SIGINT or COMSEC mistakes. I think I will start calling them 'Herivelics'. Well, you can't change men.

6:39 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Speaking of enigma, have you seen the M4 cracking project? Something you might be interested in:
http://www.bytereef.org/m4_project.html

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