[GreenKeys] Mystery printwheel tape typer

[Christian Gauger-Cosgrove]

On 17 May 2015 at 20:10, Nick England <navy.radio at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, a mystery to me, but I only know M28 machines.
>
This one is an easy one for me!

> This machine has one solenoid per character evidently - Crate is marked Army
> printer unit
> Crate 25 of 148 - was that 148 printers or 148 crates to make a complete
> machine? Who knows!
>
That's the printing unit of a SIGABA. Also called the ECM Mark II,
M-134, CSP-889, or CSP-2900.

>From my recollection, at a minimum, the printer of the SIGABA was made
by Teletype Corporation, though I think the rest of the machine was as
well, but I am not sure.


> http://www.navy-radio.com/puzzlers.htm#typewheel
>
> Thanks for any info or leads,
> Nick
>
It's a rotor machine in a similar vein to the German Enigma, or the
later KL-7, it was used jointly by the US Army and Navy during WWII,
and was never released to foreign nations (unless accompanied by
American personnel who would keep the machine's workings a secret).
It, and the British TYPEX were eventually modified into the Combined
Cipher Machine that let the US and UK communicate without releasing
their machines to each other (though the CCM was less secure than the
SIGABA).

The SIGABA wasn't cryptanalyzed until 2003 by Michael Lee for his
Master's thesis at UCSB. There was further refinements to the
cryptanalysis procedures by Mark Stamp and Wing On Chan in 2007 (also
published in Cryptologia) at SJSU.

Geoff Sullivan wrote a simulator of the SIGABA, it runs on Windows 3.x
up to Windows XP. It *DOES NOT* work on Vista, 7, 8, or 10; you need
to either run Win 3.x in DOSbox, or a virtual machine of a compatible
Windows version. Anyway, link to it:
<http://cryptocellar.web.cern.ch/cryptocellar/simula/sigaba/>

The Crypto Museum has a great summary of the information on the
SIGABA: <http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/usa/sigaba/>


Cheers,
Christian
-- 
Christian M. Gauger-Cosgrove
STCKON08DS0
Contact information available upon request.