![]() The Zimmermann Telegram was also transmitted by another route. Nothing could have been further from the truth! This led the Swedes to believe that their codes had not been cracked. They were wrong, but no further complaint came from Britain. The Swedes responded by wrapping the German messages in Swedish codes, believing that Britain would now never know. Initially Britain objected to this breach of neutrality. The favourite route was through Sweden, a neutral country but with German sympathies. This forced German Atlantic messages to be passed via other countries or over wireless. The first British naval act of the war had been to sever the telegraph cable running from Germany to the US. The year was 1917 and Europe was in the grip of the 'Great War'. The story reveals so much about cryptology and the way it is used that it is relevant even today. ![]() In the 20th Century, the Zimmermann Telegram had truly global import. When cryptanalysis revealed the complicity of Mary Queen of Scots in the attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th Century, it was important continent-wide. In a few cases, however, the importance of the information wrested from the incomprehensible cipher is explosive. Usually the modification of a battle plan, a slightly improved briefing for a diplomat or better understanding of enemy intentions is all that can be effected. While many codes and ciphers have been used to protect the vital secrets of governments and armed forces through the most thrilling of historical events, it rarely falls to a cryptanalyst to change the course of history. The intercepted 'Zimmermann Telegram', the cryptanalysis of which brought the United States into the First World War, is the classic historical instance of the cryptanalysis of a Two-Part Code. The history of all codes, however, is littered with clear examples of how they were, indeed, broken. Two-Part Codes are rather harder to cryptanalyse in fact they can prove very difficult indeed. One-Part Codes are essentially quite easy to cryptanalyse, because for example the codegroup for 'cat' will always be alphabetically later than the codegroup for 'bat' and before the codegroup for 'dog'. This is a more secure solution but is more complicated to produce and the codebook becomes twice as bulky. Two-Part Codes have a randomised order of codegroups against the alphabetic order of the plaintext words. This means that only one list needs to be kept for encryption and decryption. One-Part Codes have the alphabetic order of the codegroups in the same order as the plaintext words. Codebooks are difficult to produce, expensive to distribute and time-consuming to replace. ![]() What is a Code?Ī code is a form of cryptography which takes words, groups of letters or entire sentences and replaces them with 'codegroups', secret and nonsensical terms, that can be transmitted securely 1.Ĭodes require the use of codebooks in order to function these are books containing the list of codegroups and the list of real words they relate to. This Entry looks at codes, and a particular example from history. There are various methods of encryption, including codes and ciphers. Cryptanalysis is the science of attempting to read the illegible information without the use of the secret key. Cryptography is the process of rendering language or writing illegible (encryption), then converting it back to legibility (decryption) by use of a secret key. ![]()
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