The C-35 and C-36 were cipher machines designed by Swedish cryptographer Boris Hagelin in the 1930s. These were the first of Hagelin's cipher machines to feature the pin-and-lug mechanism. A later machine in the same series, the C-38, was designated CSP-1500 by the United States Navy and M-209 by the United States military, who used it extensively.
In 1934, the French military approached Hagelin to design a printing, pocket-size cipher machine; Hagelin carved a piece of wood to outline the dimensions of a machine that would fit into a pocket. He adapted one of his previous inventions from three years earlier: an adding device designed for use in vending machines, and combined it with the pinwheel mechanism from an earlier cipher machine (the B-21). The French ordered 5,000 in 1935. Italy and the USA declined the machine, although both would later use the M-209 / C-38. Completely mechanical, the C-35 machine measured 6 × 4.5 × 2 inches, and weighed less than 3 pounds.
A revised machine, the C-36, was similar to the C-35, but had a different distribution of the lugs on the bars. Six C-36 machines were purchased by the Swedish Navy for testing in October 1937. Both machines had five pinwheels with 17, 19, 21, 23 and 25 pins, each individually settable, giving a maximum period of 3,900,225 for the machine. The C-362 revision included a few other improvements, most notably movable lugs instead of fixed.[1]
One variant had a Thai alphabet on the pinwheels, rather than the usual Latin alphabet.[citation needed]
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Transcription
SPEAKER 1: The first well known cipher, a substitution cipher, was used by Julius Caesar around 58 BC. It is now referred to as the Caesar Cipher. Caesar shifted each letter in his military commands in order to make them appear meaningless should the enemy intercept it. Imagine Alice and Bob decided to communicate using the Caesar Cipher First, they would need to agree in advance on a shift to use-- say, three. So to encrypt her message, Alice would need to apply a shift of three to each letter in her original message. So A becomes D, B becomes E, C becomes F, and so on. This unreadable, or encrypted message, is then sent to Bob openly. Then Bob simply subtracts the shift of three from each letter in order to read the original message. Incredibly, this basic cipher was used by military leaders for hundreds of years after Caesar. JULIUS CAESAR: I have fought and won. But I haven't conquered over man's spirit, which is indomitable. SPEAKER 1: However, a lock is only as strong as its weakest point. A lock breaker may look for mechanical flaws. Or failing that, extract information in order to narrow down the correct combination. The process of lock breaking and code breaking are very similar. The weakness of the Caesar Cipher was published 800 years later by an Arab mathematician named Al-Kindi. He broke the Caesar Cipher by using a clue based on an important property of the language a message is written in. If you scan text from any book and count the frequency of each letter, you will find a fairly consistent pattern. For example, these are the letter frequencies of English. This can be thought of as a fingerprint of English. We leave this fingerprint when we communicate without realizing it. This clue is one of the most valuable tools for a codebreaker. To break this cipher, they count up the frequencies of each letter in the encrypted text and check how far the fingerprint has shifted. For example, if H is the most popular letter in the encrypted message instead of E, then the shift was likely three. So they reverse the shift in order to reveal the original message. This is called frequency analysis, and it was a blow to the security of the Caesar cipher.
References
- Torbjörn Andersson, The Hagelin C-35/C-36, [2], retrieved 15 November 2005.
- Boris CW Hagelin, The Story of the Hagelin Cryptos, Cryptologia, 18(3), July 1994, pp 204–242.
- David Kahn, The Codebreakers, 1967, 2nd ed 1996, Chapter 13, pp426–427.
- Unknown, information card for a C-36 machine in the Enigma and Friends exhibit at Bletchley Park Museum, 2005.
Further reading
- C. A. Deavours, Solution of C-35 Texts with Partial Key, Cryptologia, 14(2), April 1990 pp162–168.
This page was last edited on 14 September 2023, at 14:01