Army to license Hagelin's patents. The resulting machine, the MB , became a workhorse during the war, with some , units fielded. Hagelin agreed not to sell his most secure machines to countries specified by U. He convinced Hagelin not to manufacture the new device, even though the machine had taken more than a decade to design and only about 15 had been built, most of them for the French army. However, was an interesting year in cryptography. Machine encryption was approaching a crossroads; it was starting to become clear that the future belonged to electronic encipherment.
Even a great rotor machine like the HX would soon be obsolete. That was a challenge for CAG, which had never built an electronic cipher machine. Introduced in , the machine was a failure. Also in , Hagelin's son Bo, who was the company's sales manager for the Americas and who had opposed the transaction, died in a car crash near Washington, D. Although the H was a failure, it was succeeded by a machine called the H, of which thousands were sold.
The H was designed with NSA assistance. To generate random numbers, it used multiple shift registers based on the then-emerging technology of CMOS electronics.
This mathematical algorithm was created by the NSA, which could therefore decrypt any messages enciphered by the machine.
From then on, its electronic machines, such as the HC series, were secretly designed by the NSA, sometimes with the help of corporate partners such as Motorola. This U. The backdooring of all CAG machines continued until , when the company was liquidated. William F. Friedman [top] dominated U. National Security Agency. His friend Boris Hagelin [bottom], a brilliant Swedish inventor and entrepreneur, founded Crypto AG in in Zug, Switzerland, and built it into the world's largest cipher-machine company.
TOP, U. Parts of this story emerged in leaks by CAG employees before and, especially, in a subsequent investigation by the Washington Post and a pair of European broadcasters, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen , in Germany, and Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen , in Switzerland. The Post 's article , published on 11 February , touched off firestorms in the fields of cryptology, information security, and intelligence.
The revelations badly damaged the Swiss reputation for discretion and dependability. They triggered civil and criminal litigation and an investigation by the Swiss government and, just this past May, led to the resignation of the Swiss intelligence chief Jean-Philippe Gaudin, who had fallen out with the defense minister over how the revelations had been handled.
In fact, there's an interesting parallel to our modern era, in which backdoors are increasingly common and the FBI and other U. Even before these revelations, I was deeply fascinated by the HX, the last of the great rotor machines.
This particular unit, different from the one I had seen a decade before, had been untouched since I immediately began to plan the restoration of this historically resonant machine.
People have been using codes and ciphers to protect sensitive information for a couple of thousand years.
The first ciphers were based on hand calculations and tables. In , a mechanical device that became known as the Alberti cipher wheel was introduced. Then, just after World War I, an enormous breakthrough occurred, one of the greatest in cryptographic history : Edward Hebern in the United States, Hugo Koch in the Netherlands, and Arthur Scherbius in Germany, within months of one another, patented electromechanical machines that used rotors to encipher messages.
Thus began the era of the rotor machine. Scherbius's machine became the basis for the famous Enigma used by the German military from the s until the end of WW II. To understand how a rotor machine works, first recall the basic goal of cryptography: substituting each of the letters in a message, called plaintext, with other letters in order to produce an unreadable message, called ciphertext. It's not enough to make the same substitution every time—replacing every F with a Q , for example, and every K with an H.
Such a monoalphabetic cipher would be easily solved. A simple cipher machine, such as the Enigma machine used by the German Army during World War II, has three rotors, each with 26 positions. Each position corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. Electric current enters at a position on one side of the first rotor, corresponding to a letter, say T.
The current travels through two other rotors in the same way and then, finally, exits the third rotor at a position that corresponds to a different letter, say R. So in this case, the letter T has been encrypted as R. The next time the operator strikes a key, one or more of the rotors move with respect to one another, so the next letter is encrypted with an entirely different set of permutations.
In the Enigma cipher machines [below] a plugboard added a fixed scramble to the encipherment of the rotors, swapping up to 13 letter pairs. A rotor machine gets around that problem using—you guessed it—rotors. Start with a round disk that's roughly the diameter of a hockey puck, but thinner.
On both sides of the disk, spaced evenly around the edge, are 26 metal contacts, each corresponding to a letter of the English alphabet. Inside the disk are wires connecting a contact on one side of the disk to a different one on the other side.
The disk is connected electrically to a typewriter-like keyboard. When a user hits a key on the keyboard, say W , electric current flows to the W position on one side of the rotor. The current goes through a wire in the rotor and comes out at another position, say L. However, after that keystroke, the rotor rotates one or more positions. So the next time the user hits the W key, the letter will be encrypted not as L but rather as some other letter. Though more challenging than simple substitution, such a basic, one-rotor machine would be child's play for a trained cryptanalyst to solve.
So rotor machines used multiple rotors. Versions of the Enigma, for example, had either three rotors or four. In operation, each rotor moved at varying intervals with respect to the others: A keystroke could move one rotor or two, or all of them. Operators further complicated the encryption scheme by choosing from an assortment of rotors, each wired differently, to insert in their machine.
Military Enigma machines also had a plugboard, which swapped specific pairs of letters both at the keyboard input and at the output lamps. The rotor-machine era finally ended around , with the advent of electronic and software encryption, although a Soviet rotor machine called Fialka was deployed well into the s. The HX pushed the envelope of cryptography.
For starters it has a bank of nine removable rotors. The unit I acquired has a cast-aluminum base, a power supply, a motor drive, a mechanical keyboard, and a paper-tape printer designed to display both the input text and either the enciphered or deciphered text.
In encryption mode, the operator types in the plaintext, and the encrypted message is printed out on the paper tape. Each plaintext letter typed into the keyboard is scrambled according to the many permutations of the rotor bank and modificator to yield the ciphertext letter. What are then the criteria to determine what the invention is and who invented it?
What is exactly the microprocessor and what is novel about it? No one had commercialized a single-chip CPU prior to Intel. There are people, however, who claim to have built CPUs in more than one chip before the , although they were never commercialized as chip-sets but were used only in proprietary equipment.
Although their contributions were remarkable, their CPU implementation, not being a single chip, was not a microprocessor. Pretty soon it would be impossible to distinguish a microprocessor from a CPU board built with conventional components! A single chip is important not only because of its simplicity and elegance, but because a one-chip CPU is the irreducible minimum for a CPU, thus optimizing all the critical requirements of size, speed, cost and energy consumption.
The microprocessor changed the world of computing exactly because it reduced to an absolute minimum the size, cost and energy consumption of a CPU while maximizing its speed. This fact places much emphasis on the fundamental role played by the chip design that enabled the integration of the in a single chip, more than on its architecture. Making Silicon Chips From purified silicon to technology that powers your everyday life, discover the making of silicon chips—the most complex devices ever manufactured.
Learn More About Intel History Explore the events that made news and advanced the world of technology. Talk the Talk Terms used every day at Intel. Robert Noyce: Man Behind the Microchip Biography and historical still collection of Robert Noyce, inventor of the first practical microchip.
Intel Celebrates 40 Years A driving force behind the global technology revolution, Intel shapes the future today. The theory, which would eventually come to be known as Moore's Law, was later revised and refined.
Today it states, broadly, that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double roughly every two years. However, even Mr Moore did not believe that it was set in stone forever. Even in the early days, he says, Intel's progress was out-performing Moore's law. As the years passed, the personal computer revolution took hold.
Microprocessors are now ubiquitous. But Ted believes the breadth of their versatility is still under-appreciated. Ted launches into an awed analysis of the processing power of digital cameras, and how much computing horsepower they now feature. Like a true technologist, the things that interest him most lie at the bleeding edge of electronic engineering. Attempts to make him elevate his personal achievements or evaluate his place in history are simply laughed off.
Instead, Ted would rather talk about his present-day projects. I still like to play around with micro-controllers. But if Ted refuses to recognise his own status, others are keen to.
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