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Archive Project Will Digitize Wwii Enigma Messages
A World War II-era electro-mechanical Enigma encryption machine.
Credit: www.virginmedia.com
British historians have launched a project to digitize messages intercepted from Germany's Enigma machine during World War II. The encrypted messages were decoded by mathematicians and cryptography experts at Bletchley Park. The German military messages were typed on trimmed slips of paper and glued into now-fragile, decaying books. Bletchley Park's archive also includes drawers full of maps, and a system of index cards used to classify messages by subject. Once the typed transcripts of the decoded messages have been scanned, they will be indexed using optical character recognition technology, which will make them searchable by keyword.
"You can start to do research and connect up names, places, phrases, which is exactly what we want in this because these messages never tell you a whole story, they tell you a bit of a story," says Bletchley Park Trust CEO Simon Greenish.
The messages reveal how the Allies duped the Germans into believing they would not land at Normandy, France, and include the transmissions of the colorful British double agent Eddie Chapman.
From Network World
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