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Encyclopedia > Siemens and Halske T52
"STURGEON" exhibit at the National Cryptologic Museum.
"STURGEON" exhibit at the National Cryptologic Museum.

The Siemens and Halske T52, also known as the Geheimfernschreiber ("secret teleprinter"), or Schlüsselfernschreibmaschine (SFM), was a World War II German teleprinter cipher machine. The machine and its traffic were codenamed Sturgeon by British cryptanalysts. Download high resolution version (480x640, 333 KB)From NSA museum. ... Download high resolution version (480x640, 333 KB)From NSA museum. ... The United States National Cryptologic Museum is museum of cryptography history, affiliated with the National Security Agency (NSA). ... Siemens AG (FWB: SIE, NYSE: SI) is the worlds largest electronics company. ... Combatants Allies: • Soviet Union, • UK & Commonwealth, • USA, • France/Free France, • China, • Poland, • ...and others Axis: • Germany, • Japan, • Italy, • ...and others Commanders Strength Casualties Full list Full list World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a large scale military conflict that took place between 1939 and 1945. ... Teletype machines in World War II A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is a now largely obsolete electro-mechanical typewriter which can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point through a simple electrical communications channel, often just a pair of wires. ... This article is about algorithms for encryption and decryption. ... Cryptanalysis (from the Greek kryptós, hidden, and analýein, to loosen or to untie) is the study of methods for obtaining the meaning of encrypted information without access to the secret information which is normally required to do so. ...


While the Enigma machine was generally used by field units, the T52 was an online machine used by Luftwaffe and German Navy units, which could support the heavy machine, teletypewriter and attendant fixed circuits. It fulfilled a similar role to the Lorenz SZ 40/42 machine in the German Army. A three-rotor German military Enigma machine showing, from bottom to top, the plugboard, the keyboard, the lamps and the finger-wheels of the rotors emerging from the inner lid (version with labels). ... Online means being connected to the Internet or another similar electronic network, like a bulletin board system. ... The Deutsche Luftwaffe or (help· info) (German: Air Arm, IPA: [luftvafə]) is the commonly used term for the German air force. ... An electrical network is an interconnection of electrical elements such as resistors, inductors, capacitors, diodes, switches and transistors. ... The Lorenz machine was used to encrypt high-level German military communications during World War II. British cryptographers at Bletchley Park were able to break the cipher. ...


The British cryptanalysts of Bletchley Park codenamed the German teleprinter ciphers Fish, with individual cipher-systems being given further codenames: just as the T52 was called Sturgeon, the Lorenz machine was codenamed Tunny. During World War II, British and American cryptographers at Bletchley Park broke a large number of Axis codes and ciphers, including the German Enigma machine. ... A code name or cryptonym is a word or name used clandestinely to refer to another name or word. ... Fish (sometimes FISH) was the Allied codename for any of several German teleprinter stream ciphers used during World War II. While a large number of links were monitored, at least three different encryption systems were distinguished: Tunny — the Lorenz SZ 40/42 from Lorenz Electric. ... For the fish, see Tuna. ...

Contents


Operation

The teleprinters of the day emitted each character as five parallel bits on five lines, typically encoded in the Baudot code or something similar. The T52 had ten pinwheels, which were stepped in a complex nonlinear way, based in later models on their positions from various delays in the past, but in such a way that they could never stall. Each of the five plaintext bits was then XORed with the XOR sum of 3 taps from the pinwheels, and then cyclically adjacent pairs of plaintext bits were swapped or not, according to XOR sums of three (different) output bits. The numbers of pins on all the wheels were coprime, and the triplets of bits that controlled each XOR or swap were selectable through a plugboard. The term Parallel has a number of important meanings: Parallel (geometry) occurs in geometry. ... This article is about the unit of information. ... The Baudot code, named after its inventor Émile Baudot, is a character set predating EBCDIC and ASCII and used originally and primarily on teleprinters. ... The German Lorenz cipher machine contained 12 pinwheels, with a total of 501 pins . In cryptography, a pinwheel was a device for producing a short pseudorandom sequence of bits (determined by the machines initial settings), as a component in a cipher machine. ... To do: 20th century mathematics chaos theory, fractals Lyapunov stability and non-linear control systems non-linear video editing See also: Aleksandr Mikhailovich Lyapunov Dynamical system External links http://www. ... The plain text term has a different meaning. ... Exclusive disjunction (usual symbol xor) is a logical operator that results in true if one of the operands (not both) is true. ... This article is about the unit of information. ... Coprime - Wikipedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ...


This produced a much more complex cipher than the Lorenz machine, and also means that the T52 is not just a pseudorandom number generator-and-XOR cipher. For example, if a cipher clerk erred and sent two different messages using exactly the same settings — a depth of two in Bletchley jargon — this could be detected statistically but was not immediately and trivially solvable as it would be with the Lorenz. A pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) is an algorithm that generates a sequence of numbers, the elements of which are approximately independent of each other. ...


Models

A T52d on display at the Imperial War Museum, London.
Enlarge
A T52d on display at the Imperial War Museum, London.

There were several (mostly incompatible) versions of the T52: the T52a and T52b (which differed only in their electrical noise supression), T52c, T52d and T52e. While the T52a/b and T52c were cryptologically weak, the last two were more advanced devices; the movement of the wheels was intermittent, the decision on whether or not to advance them being controlled by logic circuits which took as input data from the wheels themselves. Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (2048x1536, 1314 KB) Summary A Siemens and Halske T52D cipher machine on display at the Imperial War Museum, London. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (2048x1536, 1314 KB) Summary A Siemens and Halske T52D cipher machine on display at the Imperial War Museum, London. ... Imperial War Museum, Lambeth, London The original location of the Imperial War Museum was the Crystal Palace, located at the top of Sydenham Hill. ...


In addition, a number of conceptual flaws (including very subtle ones) had been eliminated. One such flaw was the ability to reset the key-stream to a fixed point, which led to key reuse by undisciplined machine operators.


Cryptanalysis

Following the occupation of Denmark and Norway the Germans started to use a teleprinter circuit which ran through Sweden. The Swedes immediately tapped the line, in May 1940, and the mathematician and cryptographer Arne Beurling cracked the two earliest models in two weeks, using just pen and paper. The Swedes then read traffic in the system for most of the war, not only between Berlin and Oslo, but also between Germany and the German forces in Finland, and of course the German embassy in Stockholm. 1940 (MCMXL) was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1940 calendar). ... This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... Pre-19th century Leone Battista Alberti, polymath/universal genius, inventor of polyalphabetic substitution (see frequency analysis for the significance of this -- missed by most for a long time and dumbed down in the Vigenère cipher), and what may have been the first mechanical encryption aid. ... Arne Carl-August Beurling (February 3, 1905 - November 20, 1986) was a mathematician and professor of mathematics at Uppsala University (1937-1954) and later at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, USA. Arne Beurling worked extensively in harmonic analysis, complex analysis and potential theory. ... The Old town in Stockholm from the air (help· info) is the capital of Sweden, located on the east coast at the entrance of lake Mälaren. ...


The British at Bletchley Park later also broke into Sturgeon, although they did not break it as regularly as they broke Enigma or Tunny. This was partly because the T52 was by far the most complex cipher of the three, but also because the Luftwaffe very often retransmitted Sturgeon messages using easier-to-attack (or already broken) ciphers; thus, attacking Sturgeon was not the most economical way to get the plaintext.


The British first detected T52 traffic in summer and autumn of 1942. One link was between Sicily and Libya, codenamed "Sturgeon", and another from the Aegean to Sicily, codenamed "Mackerel". Operators of both links were in the habit of enciphering several messages with the same machine settings, producing large numbers of depths. These depths were analysed by Michael Crum. Sicilian disambiguates here; see also Sicilian language or Sicilian Defence. ... The Aegean Sea. ... Sicilian disambiguates here; see also Sicilian language or Sicilian Defence. ...


See also

SIGABA In the history of cryptography, the ECM Mark II was a rotor machine used by the United States from World War II (WWII) until the 1950s. ... Typex was based on the commercial Enigma machine, but incorporated a number of additional features to improve the security. ...

References

  • Donald W. Davies, The Siemens and Halske T52e Cipher Machine (reprinted in Cryptology: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Artech House, Norwood, 1987)
  • Donald W. Davies, The Early Models of the Siemens and Halske T52 Cipher Machine (also reprinted in Cryptology: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow)
  • Donald W. Davies, New Information on the History of the Siemens and Halske T52 Cipher Machines (reprinted in Selections from Cryptologia: History, People, and Technology, Artech House, Norwood, 1998)

Donald Davies Donald Watts Davies (June 7, 1924 – May 28, 2000) was a UK computer scientist who was a co-inventor of packet switching (and originator of the term), along with Paul Baran and Leonard Kleinrock. ...

External links

  • John Savard's page on the Geheimfernschreiber
  • Photographs of Sturgeon
  • [1] Entry for "Sturgeon" in the GC&CS Cryptographic Dictionary


The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) (previously named the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS)) is the main British intelligence service providing signals intelligence (SIGINT). ...

Cipher machines edit
Rotor machines: CCM | Enigma | Fialka | Hebern | HX-63 | KL-7 | Lacida | M-325 | Mercury | NEMA | OMI | Portex | SIGABA | SIGCUM | Singlet | Typex
Mechanical: Bazeries cylinder | C-36 | C-52 | CD-57 | Cipher disk | HC-9 | Kryha | Jefferson disk | M-94 | M-209 | Reihenschieber | Scytale
Teleprinter: 5-UCO | BID 770 | KW-26 | KW-37 | Lorenz SZ 40/42 | Siemens and Halske T52
Secure voice: KY-57 | KY-58 | KY-68 | Omni | Secure Terminal Equipment | SIGSALY | STU-III | VINSON | SCIP | Sectéra Secure Module
Miscellaneous: Cryptex | JADE | KG-84 | KL-43 | Noreen | PURPLE | Pinwheel | Rockex

  Results from FactBites:
 
BIGpedia - Siemens and Halske T52 - Encyclopedia and Dictionary Online (537 words)
The Siemens and Halske T52, also known as the Geheimfernschreiber ("secret teleprinter"), was a World War II German teleprinter cipher machine.
The T52 had ten pinwheels, which were stepped in a complex, nonlinear way, based in later models on their positions from various delays in the past, but in such a way that they could never stall.
Partly this was because the T52 was by far the most complex cipher of the three, but also because the Luftwaffe very often retransmitted Sturgeon messages using easier to attack (or already broken) ciphers; thus, attacking Sturgeon was not the most economical way to get the plaintext.
  More results at FactBites »


 

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