Biuro Szyfrów

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The Biuro Szyfrów (['bjurɔ 'ʃɨfruf] (help·info), Polish for "Cipher Bureau") was the Polish agency concerned with both cryptography (the use of ciphers and codes) and cryptanalysis (the "breaking" of ciphers and codes).

The Polish Cipher Bureau enjoyed notable successes against Soviet cryptography during the Polish-Soviet War (1919-21), helping to preserve Poland's independence, just recently regained in the wake of World War I.

Beginning in December 1932, the Cipher Bureau broke the German Enigma machine cipher and overcame the ever-growing structural and operating complexities of the evolving Enigma with plugboard, which would be the main German cipher device during World War II.

The Cipher Bureau's purview included both ciphers and codes. In loose Polish parlance, "cipher" ("szyfr") refers to both these two principal categories of cryptography. (The opposite is the practice in English, which loosely refers to both codes and ciphers as "codes.")

[edit] History

A Polish Army "Cipher Section" (Sekcja Szyfrów) was created by Lt. Józef Stanslicki on May 8, 1919 (Bury (2004)), and a few months later it was renamed the "Cipher Bureau" (Biuro Szyfrów). It reported to the Polish General Staff, and contributed substantially to the defense of Poland by Józef Piłsudski's forces during the Polish-Soviet War (1919-1921). Soviet military cryptography at the time was both primitive and erratic; when actually used, it was often further weakened by Soviet cipher clerks' neglect of elementary security practices.

[edit] Russian ciphers

The most frequently used Russian cipher was broken as early as 1919 by a young mathematician, Stefan Mazurkiewicz, who later became vice rector of Warsaw University. Orders from Soviet commander Mikhail Tukhachevski's staff became known to Polish Army leaders as a result. Polish cryptologists enjoyed generous support under the command of Col. Tadeusz Schaetzel, chief of the Polish General Staff's Section II (Intelligence); they worked at Warsaw's radio station WAR, one of two Polish long-range radio transmitters of the time. Cryptanalytic work led to Polish discovery of a large gap on the Red Army's left flank, and the Poles were able to drive a wedge into that gap during the August 1920 Battle of Warsaw. Cryptanalysis also determined that the 4th Red Army had lost contact with its headquarters; as a result, it continued advancing into Pomerania (Pomorze) on the Baltic coast — even after a general Soviet retreat was underway — and was completely destroyed.

Polish General Staff building (the Saxon Palace), in Warsaw, seen from the Saxon Square. Before the arcade housing Poland's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier stands Bertel Thorvaldsen's equestrian statue of Prince Józef Poniatowski. It was in this building, in 1932, that the Cipher Bureau first broke the pluboard military Enigma, which would be the main German cipher device during World War II.

[edit] Cipher Bureau

The Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau was formed in mid-1931 by a merger of the Radio Intelligence Office (Referat Radiowywiadu) and the Polish-Cryptography Office (Referat Szyfrów Własnych) (Władysław Kozaczuk, 1984, Enigma, p. 23, note 6). Between 1932 and 1936, the Cipher Bureau took on additional responsibilities, including radio communications between military-intelligence posts in Poland and abroad, and radio counterintelligence (mobile direction-finding and intercept stations for location and traffic analysis of espionage and fifth-column transmitters operating in Poland).

Cyclometer (1934). Diagram from Marian Rejewski’s papers. 1: Rotor lid closed, 2: Rotor lid open, 3: Rheostat, 4: Glowlamp, 5: Switches, 6: Letters

Polish General Staff building. Rear view, from the Saxon Garden.

On January 15, 1929, Major Gwido Langer, after a tour of duty as chief of staff of the 1st Legion Infantry Division, became chief of the Radio Intelligence Office, and subsequently of the Cipher Bureau. The Bureau's deputy chief, and the chief of its German section (BS-4), was Captain Maksymilian Ciężki.

In 1929, while the Cipher Bureau's predecessor was headed by Major Franciszek Pokorny, Ciężki, Pokorny and a civilian Bureau employee, Antoni Palluth, taught a secret cryptology course at Poznań University for selected mathematics students. Some years later while in France, one of the students, Marian Rejewski, discovered that the entire course had been taught from French General Marcel Givièrge's book, Cours de cryptographie, published in 1925.

In September 1932, Ciężki hired three young graduates of the course as bureau staff: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski.

Zygalski (perforated) sheet (1938).

[edit] Enigma

AVA factory.

Cipher Bureau building constructed in 1937 in the Kabaty Woods, south of Warsaw.

Rejewski made one of the greatest advances in cryptographic history (see Kahn's comment on this) in December 1932 by applying mathematics — group theory — to breaking the German armed forces' Enigma machine ciphers (the Navy had adopted a modified civilian Enigma machine in 1926, the Army in 1928). The Bureau commissioned the AVA Radio Manufacturing Company, co-owned by Palluth, to build "doubles" of the German Enigma to Rejewski's specifications, as well as cryptologic devices such as Rejewski's "cyclometer" and "cryptologic bomb." "Zygalski sheets" were produced by Cipher Bureau personnel.

Information obtained from Enigma decryption seems to have been directed from B.S.-4 principally to the German Office of the General Staff's Section II. There, from fall 1935 to mid-April 1939, it was worked up by Major Jan Leśniak, who in April that year turned the German Office over to another officer.

[edit] Kabaty Woods

The Cipher Bureau's German section, BS-4, was housed in the Polish General Staff building (the stately 18th-century "Saxon Palace") in Warsaw until 1937. That year, for reasons of space and security, BS-4 moved into specially constructed new facilities in the Kabaty Woods near Pyry, south of Warsaw.

Cryptologic bomb (1938). Diagram from Marian Rejewski's papers. 1: Rotors (for clarity, only one 3-rotor set is shown). 2: Electric motor. 3: Switches.

[edit] Precious gift

It was there, on July 26, 1939, with World War II looming only five weeks off, that the Cipher Bureau's chiefs, Lt. Col. Gwido Langer and Major Maksymilian Ciężki, the three civilian mathematician-cryptologists, and Col. Stefan Mayer (Polish General Staff intelligence chief), on General Staff instructions, revealed Poland's Enigma-decryption achievements to intelligence representatives of France (Major Gustave Bertrand, the French radio-intelligence and cryptology chief, and Capt. Henri Braquenié of the French Air Force staff) and Britain (Commander Alastair Denniston, chief of Britain's Government Code and Cypher School; Alfred Dillwyn Knox, chief British cryptologist; and Commander Humphrey Sandwith, chief of the Royal Navy's intercept and direction-finding stations)^[1].

At PC Bruno, outside Paris, France, during the Phony War (October 1939 - May 1940):
From left: Polish Lt. Col. Gwido Langer, French Major Gustave Bertrand, and British liaison officer Capt. Kenneth McFarlan.

Rejewski had ultimately solved a crucial element in the Enigma machine's structure, the wiring of the letters of the alphabet into the entry drum, with the inspired guess that they might be wired in simple alphabetical order. Now, at the trilateral meeting — Rejewski was later to recount — "the first question that... Dillwyn Knox asked was: 'What are the connections in the entry drum?'" Knox was mortified to learn how simple the answer was.

The Poles' gift, to their western Allies, of Enigma decryption, a little over a month before the outbreak of World War II, came not a moment too soon. Former Bletchley Park mathematician-cryptologist Gordon Welchman has written: "Ultra [the British Enigma-decryption operation] would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the German military... Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use." Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill was to tell King George VI after the war: "It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war."

Knox, in a letter dated August 1, 1939, thanked the Poles, in Polish, "for your cooperation and patience." He enclosed little paper batons, and a scarf picturing a Derby horse race—evidently emblematic of the cryptological race that Knox had hoped to win, using the batons, and whose personal loss he was gallantly acknowledging.

On September 5, 1939, as it became clear that Poland was unlikely to halt the German invasion, BS-4 received orders to destroy part of its files and evacuate essential personnel.

[edit] Between two giants

Poland in Axis hands.

Adolf Hitler, in his Mercedes, before the Polish General Staff building (the Saxon Palace) and Bertel Thorvaldsen's equestrian statue of Prince Józef Poniatowski, inspects German troops during victory parade in October 1939. It was in this building that Enigma had first been broken, seven years earlier.

1983 Polish 5-złoty postage stamp commemorating the "50th anniversary of the breaking of the Enigma cipher." (The shaft of the spear "breaking" the "E", for "Enigma", is in the Polish national colors — white over red.)

On September 17, as the Soviet Army invaded Poland, Cipher Bureau personnel crossed the southeastern border with other Polish military and government personnel, into Romania. They eventually made their way to France where, at "PC Bruno", outside Paris, they continued breaking German Enigma traffic in collaboration with Bletchley Park, fifty miles northwest of London, England. In the interest of security, the allied cryptological services, before sending their messages over a teletype line, encrypted them using Enigma doubles. Henri Braquenié often closed messages with a "Heil Hitler!"

As late as December 1939, when Lt. Col. Gwido Langer, accompanied by Captain Braquenié, visited London and Bletchley Park, the British asked that the Polish cryptologists be turned over to them. Langer, however, took the position that the Polish team must remain where the Polish Armed Forces were being formed—on French soil. (Kozaczuk, 1984 Enigma, pp. 99, 102.) The mathematicians might actually have reached Britain much earlier—and much more comfortably—than they eventually did; but when they went to the British embassy in Bucharest, Romania, they were not recognized as important enough by preoccupied British diplomats. (Kozaczuk, p. 79.)

Following the capitulation of France in June 1940, the Poles were evacuated to Algeria, in North Africa. On October 1, 1940, they resumed their work at "Cadix", near Uzès in unoccupied southern, Vichy France under the sponsorship of Gustave Bertrand. They worked there until, a little over two years later, the "Free Zone" was occupied by the Germans in November 1942.

On November 8, 1942, Bertrand learned from the BBC that the Allies had landed in North Africa (as part of "Operation Torch"). Knowing that the Germans planned in such an eventuality to occupy Vichy France he evacuated Cadix on November 9. Two days later, November 11, the Germans marched into southern France.

Since it was established in October 1940, Cadix had decrypted thousands of Wehrmacht, SS and Gestapo messages originating not only from French territory but from across Europe, providing invaluable intelligence to Allied commands and resistance movements.

Cadix's Polish personnel evaded the occupying Italian security police and German Gestapo, and ultimately sought to escape France via Spain. Jerzy Różycki, Jan Graliński and Piotr Smoleński had died in the January 1942 sinking of a French passenger ship in the Mediterranean. Marian Rejewski and Henryk Zygalski went to the Spanish border, where they were arrested January 30, 1943. They were incarcerated for three months before being released, after Red Cross intervention, on May 4, 1943, and managed to join the Polish Armed Forces in Britain.

[edit] Top secret

Despite their travails, Rejewski and Zygalski had fared better than some of their colleagues. Cadix's Polish military chiefs, Langer and Ciężki, had also been captured — by the Germans, as they tried to cross from France into Spain on the night of March 10-11, 1943 — along with three of the other Poles: Antoni Palluth, Edward Fokczyński and Kazimierz Gaca. The first two became prisoners of war, and the other three were sent as slave labor to Germany, where Palluth and Fokczyński died. None of these men betrayed the secret of Enigma's decryption.

Several other Poles from Cadix, including Wiktor Michałowski, managed to reach Britain.

Before the war, Antoni Palluth (one of the lecturers in the 1929 secret Poznań University cryptology course), had been co-owner of AVA, a Warsaw radio-manufacturing enterprise that produced equipment for the Cipher Bureau. Under German occupation, some AVA workers were interrogated but managed to keep silent on Polish cryptologic breakthroughs and to avoid exciting suspicions about compromises to the security of the Engima systems.

[edit] In popular culture

A German military Enigma machine.

The 1979 Polish film Sekret Enigmy (The Enigma Secret) [1] is a fair, if superficial, account of the Cipher Bureau's story, while the 2001 Hollywood film Enigma has been criticized for many historical inaccuracies, including omission of the crucial role of the Polish Cipher Bureau in breaking Enigma.

[edit] See also

• Saxon Palace, in Warsaw, where German Enigma ciphers were first broken (December 1932).

• Cryptologic methods and technology
  • "ANX method"
  • Enigma "doubles" (1932)
  • Grill
  • Clock
  • Cyclometer (1934)
  • Card catalog (1935)
  • Cryptologic bomb (1938): a machine designed by Marian Rejewski to facilitate the retrieval of Enigma keys.
  • Zygalski sheets (1938): invented by Henryk Zygalski and called "perforated sheets" by the Poles, the device made possible the reconstitution of the Enigma's entire cipher key.

• Bombe: a machine, inspired by Rejewski's "Cryptologic bomb", that was used by British and American cryptologists during World War II.
• Cryptanalysis of the Enigma, and Enigma machine.
• Polish School of Mathematics.
• History of Polish Intelligence Services.

[edit] References

1. ^ Ralph Erskine, "The Poles Reveal their Secrets: Alastair Denniston's Account of the July 1939 Meeting at Pyry", pp. 294-305, Cryptologia 30(4), 2006

• Władysław Kozaczuk, Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken, and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War Two, edited and translated by Christopher Kasparek, Frederick, MD, University Publications of America, 1984.
• Jan Bury, "Polish Codebreaking during the Russo-Polish War of 1919–1920", Cryptologia, vol. 28, no. 3 (July 2004), pp. 193–203.
• Kris Gaj, Arkadiusz Orłowski: Facts and Myths of Enigma: Breaking Stereotypes. EUROCRYPT 2003: 106–122.
• Władysław Kozaczuk, Jerzy Straszak, Enigma: How the Poles Broke the Nazi Code, Hippocrene Books, 2004, ISBN 078180941X.
• I. J. Good and Cipher A. Deavours, afterword to: Marian Rejewski, "How Polish Mathematicians Deciphered the Enigma", Annals of the History of Computing, July 1981.
• Marian Rejewski, "An Application of the Theory of Permutations in Breaking the Enigma Cipher", Applicationes mathematicae, 1980.
• Gilbert Bloch, "Enigma before Ultra: Polish Work and the French Contribution", translated by C.A. Deavours, Cryptologia, July 1987.
• Zbigniew Brzezinski, "The Unknown Victors". pp.15–18, in Jan Stanislaw Ciechanowski, ed. Marian Rejewski 1905–1980, Living with the Enigma secret. 1st ed. Bydgoszcz, Bydgoszcz City Council, 2005, ISBN 8372081174.
• Gordon Welchman, "From Polish Bomba to British Bombe: the Birth of Ultra", Intelligence and National Security, 1986.
• Andrzej Pepłoński, Kontrwywiad II Rzeczypospolitej (Kulisy wywiadu i kontrwywiadu), Warsaw, Bellona, 2002.
• Władysław Kozaczuk, Bitwa o Tajemnice: Służby wywiadowcze Polski i Niemiec 1918-1939, Warsaw, Książka i Wiedza, 1967, 1999.
• Andrzej Misiuk, Służby Specjalne II Rzeczypospolitej (Kulisy wywiadu i kontrwywiadu), Warsaw, Bellona, 1998.
• Henryk Ćwięk, Przeciw Abwehrze (Kulisy wywiadu i kontrwywiadu), Warsaw, Bellona, 2001.
• Norman Polmar, Thomas B. Allen, Księga Szpiegów, Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Magnum, 2000.

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Biuro Szyfrów

• "Polish Enigma Double"
• About the Enigma (National Security Agency)
• "The Enigma Code Breach" by Jan Bury
• The „Enigma” and the Intelligence
• www.enigmahistory.org
• "Codebreaking and Secret Weapons in World War II" By Bill Momsen
• A Brief History of Computing Technology, 1930 to 1939
• "THE POLES CRACK ENIGMA" (from Greg Goebel's CODES, CIPHERS, & CODEBREAKING)
• (Polish) Bolszewik złamany