In the history of cryptography, the ECM Mark II was a cipher machine used by the United States for message encryption from World War II until the 1950s. The machine was also known as the SIGABA or Converter M-134 by the Army, or CSP-888/889 by the Navy, and a modified Navy version was termed the CSP-2900.
Like many machines of the era it used an electromechanical system of rotors in order to encipher messages, but with a number of security improvements over previous designs. No successful cryptanalysis of the machine during its service lifetime is publicly known.
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It was clear to US cryptographers well before World War II that the single-stepping mechanical motion of rotor machines (e.g. the Hebern machine) could be exploited by attackers. In the case of the famous Enigma machine, these attacks were supposed to be upset by periodically moving the rotors to random locations, once for each new message. This, however, proved not to be random enough, and the Enigma was being broken with relative ease late in the war.
William Friedman, director of the US Army's Signals Intelligence Service, devised a system to correct for this attack by truly randomizing the motion of the rotors. His modification consisted of a paper tape reader from a teletype machine attached to a small device with metal "feelers" positioned to pass electricity through the holes. When a letter was pressed on the keyboard the signal would be sent through the rotors as it was in the Engima, producing an encrypted version. In addition, the current would also flow through the paper tape attachment, and any holes in the tape at its current location would cause the corresponding rotor to turn, and then advance the paper tape one position. In comparison, the Enigma rotated its rotors one position with each key press, a much less random movement. The resulting design went into limited production as the M-134, and its message settings included the position of the tape and the settings of a plugboard that indicated which line of holes on the tape controlled which rotors. However, there were problems using fragile paper tapes under field conditions.
Friedman's associate, Frank Rowlett, then came up with a different way to advance the rotors, using another set of rotors. In Rowlett's design, each rotor must be constructed such that between one and four output signals were generated, advancing one or more of the rotors (rotors normally have one output for every input). There was little money for encryption development in the US before the war, so Friedman and Rowlett built a series of "add on" devices called the SIGGOO (or M-229) that were used with the existing M-134s in place of the paper tape reader. These were external boxes containing a three rotor setup in which five of the inputs were live, as if someone had pressed five keys at the same time on an Enigma, and the outputs were "gathered up" into five groups as well — that is all the letters from A to E would be wired together for instance. That way the five signals on the input side would be randomized through the rotors, and come out the far side with power in one of five lines. Now the movement of the rotors could be controlled with a day code, and the paper tape was eliminated. They referred to the combination of machines as the M-134-C.
In 1935 they showed their work to a US Navy cryptographer in OP-20-G, Joseph Wenger. He found little interest for it in the Navy until early 1937, when he showed it to Commander Laurance Safford, Friedman's counterpart in the Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence. He immediately saw the potential of the machine, and he and Cmdr. Seiler then added a number of features to make the machine easier to build, resulting in the Electric Code Machine Mark II (or ECM Mark II), which the Navy then produced as the CSP-889 (or 888).
Oddly the Army was unaware of either the changes or the mass production of the system, but were "let in" on the secret in early 1940. In 1941 the Army and Navy joined in a joint cryptographic system, based on the machine. The Army then started using it as the SIGABA.
SIGABA was similar to the Enigma in basic theory, in that it used a series of rotors to encipher every character of the plaintext into a different character of ciphertext. Unlike Enigma's three rotors however, the SIGABA included fifteen, and did not use a reflecting rotor.
The SIGABA had three banks of five rotors each; the action of two of the banks controlled the stepping of the third.
The SIGABA advanced one or more of its main rotors in a complex, pseudorandom fashion. This meant that attacks which could break other rotor machines with more simple stepping (for example, Enigma) were made much more complex. Even with the plaintext in hand, there are so many potential inputs to the encryption that it is difficult to work out the settings.
On the downside, the SIGABA was also large, heavy, expensive, difficult to operate, mechanically complex and fragile. It was nowhere near as practical a device as the Enigma, which was smaller and lighter than the radios it was used with. It found widespread use in the radio rooms of the US Navy's ships, but as a result of these practical problems the SIGABA simply couldn't be used in the field, and, in most theatres other systems were used instead, especially for tactical communications. The most famous may be the Navajo code talkers who provided tactical field communications in parts of the Pacific Theater beginning at Guadalcanal. In other theatres, less secure, but smaller lighter and tougher machines were used, such as the M-209. SIGABA, impressive as it was, was overkill for tactical communications.
SIGABA was also adapted for interoperation with a modified British machine, Typex. The common machine was known as the Combined Cipher Machine (CCM), and was used from November 1943.
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