At 11:42 AM 3/14/96 -0800, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:

------- Forwarded Message

Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 06:59:32 -0500 (EST) From: merkaba@styx.ios.com Subject: VENONA PROJECT (fwd)

- - ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 12 Mar 1996 22:07:24 -0500 From: Ronald Pearce <ronald@cybercomm.net> To: merkaba@styx.ios.com Subject: VENONA PROJECT

http://www.nsa.gov:8080/docs/venona/venona.html

The VENONA Project

In July 1995 the Intelligence Community ended a 50-year silence regarding one of cryptology's most splendid successes - the VENONA Project. ...

How they did it (from http://www.nsa.gov:8080/docs/venona/memory.html): A word about the VENONA cryptosystems---they should have been impossible to read. They consisted of a code book in which letters, words, and phrases were equated to numbers. So a code clerk would take a plain text message and encode the message using numbers from the codebook. This would have presented a significant challenge itself depending on how long the code book was used. However, the messages were further modified, in other words double-encrypted, by use of a one time pad. The use of a one time pad effectively randomizes the code and renders it unreadable. The key to the VENONA success was that mistakes were made in the construction and use of the one time pads---a fact that was discovered only through brute force and analysis of the message traffic. (http://www.nsa.gov:8080/docs/venona/monographs/monograph-2.html): ... One-time pads used properly only once are unbreakable; however, the KGB's cryptographic material manufacturing center in the Soviet Union apparently reused some of the pages from one-time pads. This provided Arlington Hall with an opening. Very few of the 1942 KGB messages were able to be solved because there was very little duplication of one-time pad pages in those messages. The situation was more favorable in 1943, even more so in 1944, and the success rate improved accordingly. Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@netcom.com | dead teenagers | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA