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← 2018
This page contains the latest news regarding the subjects on the Crypto
Museum website. Important developments and crypto-related news will be
reported here. We also send out Twitter notifications every now and
then. Click the Twitter icon at the top of the page to read our tweets.
Older news can be read by using the blue buttons on the left or the grey
buttons at the top.
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Exhibition at Wende Museum
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13 October 2024
Today, a new exhibition opened at the Wende Museum in Culver City (Los
Angeles), named Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency. It shows
aspects of (mass) surveillance, countersurveillance and facial
recognition,
in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. It is often thought that these
techniques are new, but they actually have a history that is too often
forgotten.
The exhibition shows a mixture of art and technology, and includes artifacts
from the collections of Crypto Museum, the NCM, the Wende itself, and
others. Open until 19 October 2025.
➤ Link to Wende Museum
➤ More about the exhibition
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The International Cryptology Game
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9 October 2024
Attention to all puzzle enthusiasts.
The next edition of the international online contest the CODEBREAKERS
will take off later this month. The game is dedicated to
Polish mathematicians who broke the code of the well-known German
Enigma cipher machine in December 1932 — now
more than 90 years ago. The secret work of the Polish mathematicians
contributed considerably to the success and victory of the Allies
during WWII.
The game will be in English, but a trial is available in these eight
languages — English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, Portugese, Russian and Ukrainian.
It combines elements of mathematics, history and logic in an accessible manner.
By learning about encryption and decryption methods,
the participants solve virtual puzzles and break increasingly difficult
secret messages.
Crypto Museum is proud to be once again a supporting partner of this game.
Click the poster on the right to learn more about the game.
➤ Sign up now
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There are four levels of difficulty, starting at different dates:
- TRIAL — Now
- BASIC — 21 October
- ADVENTURE — 15 November
- ENIGMA — 19 November
Prior knowlege about
breaking ciphers is not required. Depending on the level of difficulty,
each team may consists of 1, 2 or 3 people.
Curious? Click the flyer on the right to learn more, or
whatch this video on YouTube.
➤ Introduction video
➤ Download the poster
➤ Download the flyer
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21 September 2024
In an unparalled covert operation, the Israeli intelligence services
managed to disrupt the communications infrastructure of Lebanese
terrorist organisation Hezbollah. On 17 September 2024, about 4000
pagers carried by Hezbollah operatives exploded more or less simultaneously.
The following day, another 450 handheld radios also exploded.
Here is what we know so far.
➤ More information
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6 June 2024
A fully operational 3-dimensional simulator of the
Hagelin M-209
has been released by Martin Gillow of
Virtual Colossus fame.
There is no need to install anything on your computer,
as it runs entirely in the browser.
Use your mouse to watch the machine from every angle, open the lid,
rotate the rotors, select an input letter and rotate the encryption knob.
Full instructions are on the website.
➤ Run Virtual M-209 (off-site)
➤ More about the M-209
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OVCISKLu donates KL-7 cipher machine
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29 March 2024
Today, Crypto Museum received a generous gift in the form of a
KL-7 cipher machine, complete with all 12 rotors.
The machine was donated by OVCISKLu
— the Society of Former Signals and CIS Officers of the Royal Dutch Air Force.
The image on the right shows Paul Arts (left) on behalf of
OVCISKLu
and Paul Reuvers (right) on behalf of Crypto Museum, signing the
official transfer agreement. Crypto Museum is most grateful and
will do its best to restore the KL-7, so that it
can be demonstrated to the public.
➤ KL-7 rotor-based cipher machine
➤ About OVCISKLu
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Zodiac Killer's message Z340 solved
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27 March 2024
The case of the Zodiac Killer is one of the most widely known unsolved
killer cases in history. In 1969, the killer communicated with the FBI
in a series of ciphers, some of which remained unsolved to this day.
After 51 years, David Oranchak, Sam Blake and Jarl Van Eycke have finally
solved the 340-character cipher known as Z340, which appeared to be a
combination of a transposition and a homophonic substitution cipher.
Today, the authors have published their solution
– which has meanwhile been confirmed by the FBI –
in an extensive 61-page paper.
➤ Download the paper (off-site)
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18 January 2024
To commemmorate the 80th birthday of one of Britain's best kept secrets:
Colossus – the world's first electronic
digital computer – the British intelligence service GCHQ has released
hitherto undisclosed photographs that show a Colossus as late as 1963.
➤ New photographs
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Metal enclosure for Enigma-E
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16 October 2023
A new stock of Enigma-E self-build kits is now available.
The first of these kits were sold more than 20 years ago.
To commemorate this, a metal enclosure is now included with all kits
sold from August 2023 onwards — for free!
The image on the right shows the completed enclosure.
➤ Assembly instructions
➤ About the Enigma-E kit
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TETRA TEA1 algorithm broken
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Following the success of our previous exhibition – which ended just
before the start of the pandemic – Crypto Museum will be holding a series
of exhibitions in the 2nd half of 2023.
The event will take place at the
Foundation for German Technology (CDV&T) in Duivendrecht (near
Amsterdam, Netherlands). The first opening days will be on 23/24
September 2023.
➤ More information
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Bug in WikiLeaks CryptoPhone
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22 march 2022
In March 2018 a sophisticated bug was found inside a
CryptoPhone IP-19 that had been used in London for
several years by whistleblower platform WikiLeaks, in relation to
the revelations of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
It demonstrates the security of the CryptoPhone, which apparently was very
good, but also shows how far certain
intelligence services are prepared to go to achieve their goals.
In this article, we review and analyse this high-tech bug.
➤ More information
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3 August 2022
A few weeks ago we received a small
SpellMaster pocket computer
from the mid-1980s as a gift from one of our readers. This device has a
built-in encryption function of which the algorithm was unknown. On 26
July, we asked our readers to reconstruct the algorithm, based on a set
of known PT/CT pairs, in combination with a code snippet that was
published in the original patent.
Today, we are happy to announce that the first solutions were reported
just three days later and that working code examples are now available
in Phython,
C
and BBC BASIC.
➤ About the Franklin SpellMaster
➤ Analysis of the algorithm
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20-22 June 2022, Amsterdam (Netherlands)
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The International Conference on Historical Cryptology 2022 will be
held in Amsterdam (Netherlands) towards the end of June. This three day
event is open to anyone, and touches a plethora of subjects related to
cryptology and its history. One of the key speakers on the first day
will be Maarten Oberman, who has rewritten the post-WWII cryptographic
history of The Netherlands.
On the second day, Crypto Museum's Paul Reuvers and Marc Simons will
give a detailed account on
Operation RUBICON
— a covert operation of
the American CIA and the German BND in which they secretly purchased
a large crypto-manufacturer in neutral Switserland
– Crypto AG (Hagelin) –
and used it to read the diplomatic traffic of more than 130 countries until 2018.
On the third day, key speaker Gerhard Strasser will take us back several
centuries to show how sign language and other forms of non-verbal communication
were once used for passing secret messages. In addition there will be sessions
on cipher machines, historical documents, machine learning, tools, resources
and more.
Registration is open until 12 June 2022.
➤ Check out the program
➤ HistoCrypt 2022 website
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Minifon, Der Spion in der Tasche
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10 April 2022
Roland Schellin has just published a new book about the Minifon
covert wire and tape recorders of the 1950s and 60s. This book is
a complete rewrite of his earlier book of 2001 with the same title,
and contains lots of new information and high-quality colour images.
A must-have for collectors and everyone who is interested in the
early history of covert recording devices.
➤ More information
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FBI releases file about the Great Seal Bug
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16 March 2022
In 2015 we published the most complete tear down of the Great Seal Bug,
a.k.a. The Thing —
a covert listening device that was developed by the Russians and planted
in the study of the US Ambassador in Moscow. It was used to eavesdrop on
the Ambassador for more than 7 years.
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At the time, we used partly declassified reports and correspondense
of the FBI, and
undisclosed files from the CIA, and combined it to make a best educated
guess on how the bug might have worked. At the time, the full
technical report of the FBI about the device was still classified.
Apparently, our efforts have payed off, as the FBI has finally decided to
disclose their full technical report, including photographs and technical
drawings of the device. We have updated our page about this passive bug
accordingly.
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The release of the report also puts and end to the discussion about
the frequency on which the device worked, and whether or not the activation
signal used the same frequency as the signal that was (re)transmitted
by the device. It appears that we were right all along 😊.
➤ Read the full story
➤ Read the full FBI report
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NSA algorithm for the PX-1000Cr broken
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16 February 2022
In 1983, a small Dutch company by the name of
Text Lite introduced
the PX-1000 — a small pocket computer with built-in modem that was
able to send DES encrypted texts through an analog telephone line.
The device was dubbed Pocket Telex, and was also sold by
Philips.
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In April 2019 we revealed that in 1984, the NSA persuaded
Philips to buy the entire stock from Text Lite and replace DES
by an alternative encryption algorithm that was supplied by the NSA.
At the time we assumed, of course, that the NSA algorithm
was weaker than DES, but we were never able to prove that.
Until now.
Yesterday, computer scientist Stefan Marsiske published a lengthy
article in which he shows how he can break any message created on
the PX-1000Cr in less than 4 seconds on a laptop,
with no more than 17 characters of ciphertext.
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For his break, he used the description of the algorithm
published by Crypto Museum in January 2016, in combination with
a disassembly of the code he made with IDA Pro. After creating
a functional replica of the algorithm in C, he was able to use a
number of of-the-shelf software frameworks to solve the problem.
This proves that the algorithm is (much) weaker than DES.
➤ Read the full article
➤ About the PX-1000
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24 July 2021
We have just received the sad new that this afternoon
Rudolf Staritz
has died at the age of 99. Rudi was the last
surviving eyewitness who worked on and with the
German spy radio sets of
World War II.
In the 1970s and 80s he published a large number of articles on this subject.
With his bright mind and sparkling personality he was a tree of knowledge
for many radio HAMs, collectors, researchers and museums, ourselves included.
In November 2019 he was the Guest of Honour during our exhibition
Secret Communications 3.
He will be missed dearly.
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Machines rediscovered at the NCM
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2 July 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has kept many of us at home for the past year or so,
whilst all public activities were cancelled.
But it also has a positive side. Whilst the National Cryptologic Museum (NCM)
— the NSA's museum at Fort Meade (USA) — was closed to the public and plans
for a new building were put on ice, it was decided to take the
opportunity to renovate the existing building.
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The renovation works are currently underway, whilst the curators and registrars
are combing through the entire collection to see if any objects require
maintenance or special attention. And their efforts have already payed off.
Last month, the museum registrar rediscovered two machines that had not been
spotted before or that had been forgotten, probably because no
information was available about them when they were acquired.
The image on the right shows an extremely rare
Russian K-37 cipher machine
– probably the only surviving one – that was rediscovered last month.
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The machine had probably been captured during World War II, and was used by the
AFSA – the forerunner of the NSA – for analysis and codebreaking.
The K-37 was a copy of the
Hagelin B-211
and was adapted for the Cyrillic
alphabet. It is shown here with the external plugboard in a wooden box
attached to it. This is the first time a colour photograph of this machine
is made public. Interestingly, the black & white photograph of a K-37
that was shown in Boris Hagelin's memoirs — the only existing photograph
of a K-37 until now — was made of this very machine.
In addition to the K-37, the people at the NCM also found a complete
and intact OMI Criptograph,
an Italian cipher machine that was made around
1954 and that was based on the design of the
German Enigma.
It was believed that none of the original machines had survived and all that
was left was a black & white photograph in a 1954 NSA report that was
declassified in May 2014.
➤ Russian K-37 cipher machine
➤ OMI Criptograph
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14 June 2021
It a sad picture. The once so big and famous Swiss company
Crypto AG — once the pride of the Swedish inventor
Boris Hagelin,
and succeeded in 2018 by Swedish entrepreneurs Andreas and Emma Linde
under the name Crypto International AG —
has dimissed nearly all of its staff and has moved its legal seat to the nearby
town of Hünenberg. It seems that the curtain is falling.
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Following the revelations of the American, German and Swiss media —
the Washington Post, ZDF and SRF — in February 2020, that Crypto AG was
owned from 1970 onwards b the German BND and the American CIA, and from
1994 onwards solely by the CIA, the Swiss Parliament ordered an official
investigation.
As fall-out of the news, the Swiss Government withdrew
the export licence of the company, and Linde was left no other choice than
to layoff the entire workforce in July of last year. Alledgedly they
filed for bankruptcy the following month.
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With only two remaining staff members, the company left the
buildings in Steinhausen early this year and moved its legal seat to nearby
Hünenberg.
A few months ago, on 1 April, professional photographer
Patrick Hürlimann of Steinhausen took the photograph shown above.
The buildings are now abandonned and will soon be taken down to make
room for hausing development.
➤ Read the full story
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24 February 2021
After more than two years of researching the wide variety of Hagelin
C-52
and CX-52
cipher machines in collections, museums and auctions,
Bart Wessel has just published his long awaited technical paper on these
unique machines.
He explains the many types, models, versions, variants and other
differences, and gives a detailed account of how they work.
➤ Download the paper
➤ About the CX-52
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Fialka Manual free of charge
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6 January 2021
To provide a little bit of comfort in these difficult COVID-19 times,
we have decided to make the Fialka Reference Manual available free of
charge.
This manual, that was first released in 2005, contains detailed
information and drawings of the Russian M-125 (Fialka) cipher machine.
It used to be available in printed form for EUR 55 from our museum shop,
but is now totally free. However, if you appreciate our work, you might
want to consider making a small donation.
➤ Download the manual
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Objects from Museum Jan Corver for sale
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14 December 2020
After 25 years, Museum Jan Corver, the HAM radio museum of The Netherlands, is
closing its doors, due to the high age of the owner and the lack of a
successor. For the core collection, the museum foundation is still
looking for a successor. All items related to espionage have been handed
over to Crypto Museum.
The remaining objects – thousands of radio-related items –
have been handed over to
Stichting Onterfd Goed
in Eindhoven (Netherlands), where
they are now for sale.
➤ Onterfd Goed website
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14 December 2020
Currently in preparation is a paper about the Dutch
Professor Oberman and his
crypto-related work during the years 1946-1965,
which will be presented at the forthcoming
HistoCrypt Conference, that will be held in The Netherlands in September 2021
(subject to Corona crisis developments).
People who have background information or (better) documentation
about Professor Oberman's crypto-related work, or who have
worked with him in the past on the subject,
are kindly invited to contact us.
Also, if you have a specific question about Professor Oberman's
crypto-related work,
that could assist the research,
we would like to hear from you.
➤ About Professor Oberman
➤ Contact us
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26 November 2020
Following the revelation of Operation Rubicon
in February of this year, and the subsequent Swiss parliametary
investigation that
published its results
earlier this month, the Swiss
television program Rundschau now reveals that another Swiss manufacturer
of high-end crypto gear, Omnisec AG,
was also in the pocket of the CIA.
➤ Read the full story
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The International Cryptology Game
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25 October 2020
Great news from Poland. The next edition of the CODEBREAKERS
International Cryptology Game is about to start. The game is dedicated to
Polish mathematicians who broke the code of the well-known German
Enigma cipher machine, which is now
88 years ago. The secret work of the Polish mathematicians contributed
considerably to the success and victory of the Allies during WWII.
The game will be released in six languages — English, French, Spanish, German,
Polish and Russian — and combines elements of history, mathematics and logic
in an accessible way. By learning about encryption and decryption methods,
the participants solve virtual puzzles and break increasingly difficult
secret messages.
It is worth noting that everyone can enter the game, as long as they can read.
There are three
levels of difficulty: TRIAL, BASIC, ADVENTURE. Prior knowlege about
breaking ciphers is not required. Depending on the level of difficulty,
each team may consists of 1, 2 or 3 people.
Sign up now:
➤ https://thecodebreakers.org/page/info
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Crypto International AG files for bankruptcy
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27 August 2020
Following the news of early last month (see below), that
Crypto International AG
— the successor to Crypto AG —
was about to dismiss most of its workforce,
the Swiss newspaper NZZ has just announced that the company
has filed for bankruptcy.
The activities will be taken over by the Swedish company
Asperiq Group AB,
which is also owned by Andreas and Emma Linde.
A few weeks ago, on 7 August, the Linde family also registered
a new company by the name of
Asperiq AG with the Swiss chamber
of commerce.
➤ Read the NZZ article
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Mass layoffs at Crypto International AG
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4 July 2020
According to the Swiss newspaper Neue Züricher Zeitung (NZZ),
Crypto International AG (CIAG),
announced yesterday that it will lay off 83 of its
85 staff, which is nearly the entire workforce.
CIAG was established two years ago by Swedish entrepreneurs
Emma and Andreas Linde, when they
purchased part of the product portfolio of the former
Crypto AG (Hagelin).
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In February, journalists from the Washington Post, German televion ZDF and
Swiss television SRF, had revealed that for many years, the
equipment from Crypto AG
has been manipulated by BND
and CIA, under the name
Operation RUBICON.
Following these revelations,
the Swiss Government has withdrown the export licence of
CIAG
and has announced a formal criminal investigation.
➤ Read the NZZ article
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Maximator: European five-eyes revealed
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7 April 2020
In an article in Intelligence and National Security, Dutch Professor of
computer security Bart Jacobs reveals the existence of a secret signals
intelligence partnership that can be seen as the European equivalent of
the UKUSA Five Eyes. The partnership
— known as MAXIMATOR
— started in the late 1970s and comprises Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the
Netherlands and France. It is believed that it is still active today.
➤ Full article
➤ Argos Radio (Dutch)
➤ About MAXIMATOR
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Philips helped the CIA to spy on Türkiye
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20 February 2020
Today, the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, revealed how Philips
created a superchip to eavesdrop on the diplomatic traffic of many
countries, including Türkiye.
This was done by supplying these countries with a
rigged version of the
Aroflex cipher machine.
➤ Volkskrant website
➤ More about Aroflex
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The intelligence coup of the century
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11 February 2020
For many years it has been speculated that the cipher machines of
Crypto AG (Hagelin)
have exploitable weaknesses (backdoors)
that can be used by Western intelligence services to break encrypted messages.
From the Friedman Collection we already knew that a secret unwritten
Gentleman's Agreement existed between
Hagelin and the American NSA from 1951 onwards.
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But the actual story is almost unimaginable. Investigative journalists
of the German TV station ZDF, and the American newspaper Washington
Post, have now discovered that in 1970,
Crypto AG was
secretly purchased by the German
Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and the American
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a covert operation named
RUBICON.
For several decades it enabled NSA – and its German sister ZfCh -
to read nearly all diplomatic traffic
of the countries that were on the CIA/NSA target list.
➤ Learn more
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Over the course of the next few days and weeks, several news media will
report about Operation RUBICON, starting tonight with the German ZDF
television program Frontal-21, And tomorrow morning, the US newspaper
The Washington Post will give a detailed account of the operation.
Crypto Museum will provide detailed technical backgrounds at a later
moment. Coming soon...
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Enigma. We have got news.
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6 December 2019
It is widely known that the Poles were the first to break the
Enigma cipher,
and that – just before the outbreak of WWII – they shared their
knowledge with French and British intelligence,
during a secret meeting in Pyry (Poland).
However, the exact details of the Pyry meeting have so
far never been found in French or British archives.
In this video, Polish writer Marek Grajek presents new facts about
the breaking of Enigma, based on files disclosed by French intelligence
in 2016, and comments on it together with Sir Dermot Turing and Prof. Philippe
Guillot.
➤ Watch the video (English subtitles)
➤ Same video with French subtitles
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4 June 2019
Following the success of our earlier exhibitions in
2013
and 2016,
Crypto Museum has once again teamed up with Athur Bauer's
Foundation for German Communication
in Duivendrecht (Netherlands) for an exhibition that will
open in November of this year.
➤ More information
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NSA intervention in The Netherlands
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KGB Spy Museum opens in New York City
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17 January 2019
Today, the exciting new KGB Spy Museum
in Manhattan (New York) opens its doors
to the press. Over the past few months Lithuanian collector Julius Urbaitis
and his daughter Agne have been working hard to bring an interesting and
diverse collection of Cold War Spy gadgets together in their new
4000 square-feet museum at 245 West 14th Street in New York.
The museum will be dedicated to the history of the KGB and its far-reaching
operations over the years. There are many artifacts, including spy cameras,
spy radios, concealment devices, cipher machines, etc.
➤ More about the museum
➤ KGB Spy Museum website
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© Crypto Museum. Last changed: Saturday, 09 November 2024 - 08:14 CET.
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![1 April 2021 - the CRYPTO logo is removed from the building in Steinhausen. © Copyright Patrick Hürlimann Fotografie [17].](../manuf/ciag/img/303633/000/small.jpg)
