An amateur German cryptographer has beaten a replica of the World War Two
code-breaking Colossus computer in a
race to decrypt
data.
The
National
Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park staged the event to show off the newly
rebuilt Colossus and to raise money for the museum.
The
aim
of the challenge was to pit Colossus against a virtual Colossus running the
same programs on a laptop.
A German team encrypted three messages using an authentic Lorenz S42
encrypter used by the German army, and broadcast the messages by radio.
But both teams were beaten by amateur cryptographer Joachim Schuth, who used
software he had designed specially.
The team using the virtual Colossus came second, and the actual Colossus
trailed well behind. It was held up by problems with the radio transmission and
two valves blowing just before the final run on the code.
The
rebuilding
of Colossus took 14 years, in part because the original machines and their
plans were destroyed after the war to keep the project secret.
The only details the team had to work with were 10 photographs, a few pages
of circuit diagrams that had been kept illegally and a paper from the machine's
creator
Dr
Tommy Flowers.
"It was extremely important in the build up to D-Day," Tony Sale, who led the
rebuilding team, told the
BBC.
"It revealed troop movements, the state of supplies, state of ammunition,
numbers of dead soldiers, vitally important information for the whole of the
second part of the War."
The Colossus machine will stay in the museum for public display. The museum
hopes it will help raise the £6m needed to ensure that the centre remains open.
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