Everyone is welcome to attend the lecture of Prof. Sandy Zabell with the title
"The paradox of German high-level cryptography in WWII".
ABSTRACT: The title of this talk is the title of Chapter 1 of the
second volume of the now declassified 1946 US Army Security Agency book
/European Axis Signal Intelligence/, which starts off:
German high-level cryptographic systems were insecure although
brilliantly conceived.
In this talk I discuss the reasons for this paradox based on the
material in various TICOM documents. (TICOM was the "Target
Intelligence Committee", a joint UK-US group at the end of WWII tasked
with acquiring German signals intelligence assets - personnel,
equipment, and intercepts.) Surprisingly, it turns out that the reasons
for this meltdown in operational security on the German side are quite
simple to understand, involving both deficiencies in organization and
resistance to facing inconvenient truths. Even more surprisingly, many
of the research cryptologists in both the Wehrmacht and Army were well
aware of these problems, but their concerns were (fortunately) ignored.
This is joint work with Frode Weierud (Crypto Cellar Research)
