Reuters: Woman Enigma Cracker Ignored

[Owen Blacker]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

http://www.wired.com/news/women/0,1540,47560,00.html

| Woman Enigma Cracker Was Dissed 
| Reuters 
| 
| 6:42 a.m. Oct. 15, 2001 PDT  
|      
| LONDON -- A British woman cracked a key component of Germany's top-secret
| Enigma encoding machine before World War II began, but her supervisors
| dismissed her theory as too simple, according to a new book published on
| Monday.   
| 
| British newspapers ran excerpts of the book, Action This Day, which
| claims that discoveries made by a female codebreaker known only as "Mrs
| BB" could have opened the secrets of the encoding machine and shortened
| the war.   
| 
| Codebreakers including Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer,
| were trying in the late 1930s to break the Enigma cypher, the key to
| Germany's communication system. 
|  
| But they could not figure how the keys of the Enigma machine were wired
| up.   
| 
| The book's editors, Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine, said that "Mrs BB"
| suggested the Germans wired the A key to the A rotor, B to B and so on
| through the alphabet -- a theory dismissed as too simplistic, but one
| that proved correct.   
| 
| "Surprisingly, one cryptanalyst, a 'Mrs BB,' had seriously contemplated
| that the wiring was indeed an identity (A to A etc)," historian Erskine
| wrote.   
| 
| But one of Mrs BB's senior colleagues discounted her theory "probably
| because he could not believe that the Germans had been so stupid," he
| wrote.   
| 
| The full Enigma code was finally cracked by a team of thousands of men
| and women, including chess masters, civil servants and mathematics
| geniuses, laying bare German troop and submarine movements.   
| 
| The book also contains chapters written by former codebreakers. Its
| royalties will be donated to the Bletchley Trust at Bletchley Park, the
| site of a house in north London where codebreakers laboured before and
| during the war.   
| 
| Copyright (c) 2001 Reuters Limited. 

- -- 
Owen Blacker
Senior Software Developer / InfoSec Consultant    Wheel: Clerkenwell
See http://www.owens-place.org.uk/pgp.html -- more about my PGP keys
Sig  0x3e2056b9 | 18cd 92aa 32aa 81b9 f5e8  c520 6475 6239 3e20 56b9

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 7.0.4
Comment: Due to RIP, pls check for revocation before using this key!

iQA/AwUBO8wF2WR1Yjk+IFa5EQIgIACfU3UbQ8udzN3qSD2gk/CyZQ2tBjkAoJ+3
BcSRB/Y4COevpLEj/KZTDk9j
=VKa6
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

_____________________________________________________________________
This message has been checked for all known viruses by UUNET delivered 
through the MessageLabs Virus Control Centre. For further information visit
http://www.uk.uu.net/products/security/virus/