[Waverley ARS] Notice of special Cipher Event involving Bletchley Park

[Simon Buxton]

Eddie

This is a real challenge, hence worldwide, and it will be interesting to 
see if any govt department or uni can succeed, as I doubt if any other 
organisation would have a chance. The computer simulation of the Lorenz 
machine only gives you the information to start to write your program to 
simulate Colossus. To be successful, you will need to

1) Have a good knowledge of German, especially that occurring in WWII 
signals
2) Write a program to run the Lorenz simulation at ultra high speeds 
against the cypher text
3) Be very clever in working out some likely start positions of the 
wheels to have a reasonable run time
4 ) Determine one or more "cribs", which are words or other content 
likely to occur in the message to match your decrypt against in order to 
recognise a possibly successful setting.
5) Have a very fast computer (PC is not enough)
6) Have a thorough knowledge and experience of crypyt-analysis
7) Be able to copy the coded message in transmitted form

I will watch from the sidelines as I havent the intellect, knowledge, 
experience or facilities to take part.

73 Simon

Eddie Hanham wrote:
> Dear Members,
>
> This email is being sent to advise members of a Special Cipher Event 
> sheduled for 15 ~ 16th November, to celebrate the completion of the 
> Colossus Mk 2 Rebuild.
>
> What is the EVENT about ?
>
> To transmit, by radio, by teleprinter, from the Heinz Nixdorf 
> Computer Museum in Paderborn in Germany, a series of secret messages 
> enciphered on a WW II Lorenz SZ42 cipher machine.
>
> To issue a world-wide challenge to anyone to break the cipher 
> settings and decipher these messages before the Rebuild of WW II 
> Colossus Mk 2 in Bletchley Park does it. 
>
> etc