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Friedman

Specialty Definition: William F. Friedman

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

William Frederick Friedman (September 24,1891 - November 12,1969) served as a US Army cryptologist, running the research division of the Army's Signals Intelligence Service through the 1930s and its follow-on services right into the 1950s. He supervised the breaking of the Japanese Purple code in the late 1930s. Frank Rowlett led the SIS team which cracked the cypher machine. The output provided considerable information about Japanese diplomacy at the highest level througout World War II and afterwards, until Congressional hearings made public the fact that the US had been reading messages proccessed by that crypto system. Many consider Friedman one of the greatest cryptologists of all time, and his application of statistical methods to code-breaking one of the most significant advances in the field. He also coined much of the language used in decryption, introducing terms such as cryptography and cryptanalysis.

Friedman was born in Russia, the son of a postal worker who migrated to Pittsburgh in 1892. He studied at the Michigan Agricultural College in East Lansing and received a scholarship to work on genetics at Cornell University . Meanwhile George Fabyan, who ran a private research laboratory to study any project that caught his fancy, decided to set up his own genetics project and was referred to Friedman. Friedman joined Fabyan's Riverbank Laboratories outside Chicago in September 1915. As head of the Department of Genetics, one of the projects he ran studied the effects of moonlight on crop growth, and so he experimented with the planting of wheat during various phases of the moon.

Another of Fabyan's pet projects funded Elizabeth Wells Gallup's research into the coded messages which Sir Francis Bacon had allegedly hidden in various texts during the reign of Elizabeth I and James 1. Believing that she had detected that many of Shakespeare's works also included such hidden messages, Gallup became convinced that Bacon wrote many, if not all, of William Shakespeare's works. Friedman had become something of an expert photographer while working on his other projects, and was asked to travel to England on several occasions to help Gallup photograph historical manuscripts during her research. At this point he became facinated with cryptology, while he courted Elizebeth Smith, Mrs. Gallup's assistant and an accomplished cryptologist. They married, and soon after he became the director of the Department of Codes and Ciphers as well as of the Department of Genetics at Riverbank.

With the US's entry into World War I, Fabyan offered the services of his Department of Codes and Ciphers to the government. No Federal department existed for this kind of work (although both the Army and the Navy had had embryonic departments at various times), and soon Riverbank became the unofficial cryptographic center for the Federal GovernmentUS. During this period the Friedmans cracked a code used by German-funded Hindu radicals in the US who planned to ship arms to India to gain independence from Britain. Analysing the format of the messages, Riverbank realized that the code was based on a dictionary of some sort, a common encryption technique. The Friedmans soon managed to decode most messages, but only long after the case had come to trial did the book itself come to light: a German-English dictionary published in 1880.

The United States government decided to set up its own code-breaking service, and sent Army officers to Riverbank for training under Friedman. To support their training, Friedman produced a series of technical monographs, completing seven by early 1918. He then enlisted in the Army, and travelled to France to serve as the personal code-breaker for General John Pershing. He returned to the US in 1920 and published an eighth monograph, which is considered to be the most important single publication in modern cryptology to that time.

In 1921 he joined the government's American Black Chamber where he was placed in charge of researching new codes and ways to break them, and in 1922 he was promoted to head the Research and Development Division. After the dissolution of the Black Chamber in 1929, Friedman moved to the Army's Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) in a similar capacity.

During the 1920s a series of new cyphers processed by machines gained popularity, based largely on typewriter mechanicals attached to basic electrical circuitry - batteries, switches and lights. The first of such machines had been the Hebern Rotor Machine, designed in the US in 1915 by Edward Hebern. This system offered such security and simplicity of use that Hebern heavily promoted his company to investors, feeling that all companies would soon be using them and his company would clearly be successful. But the company went bankrupt when the war ended, and Hebern eventually landed in prison, convicted of stock manipulation.

Friedman realized that the new rotor machines would be important, and devoted some time to cracking Hebern's design. Over a period of years he discovered a number of problems common to most of the rotor machine designs. Examples of some dangerous features included having the rotors turn once with every keypress, and making the fast rotor (the one that turns with every keypress) at either end of the rotor stack. In this case the output generated by the machines will have strings of 26 letters that form a simple substitution cipher, and by collecting enough cyphertext and applying a standard statistical method known as the kappa test, he showed that he could, albeit with great difficulty, crack any code generated by such a machine.

Friedman then used his understanding of the rotor machines to develop several of his own that remained immune to his own attacks. He eventually developed nine designs, six of which remain still secret today. Some of his inventions while developing these systems only gained patents decades later, since the Defense Department regarded them as so critical that granting a patent would harm national security. The culmination of various earlier designs resulted in the SIGABA, which became the US's highest security encryption system during World War II. It was similar to the British Typex machine, and adapters were apparetnly built which could allow the two machines to interoperate. Neither was, as far as is publicly known, broken during WWII. In fact, SIGABA would still be quite good tady, in the computer era. computers.

In 1939 the Japanese introduced a new cypher machine system for their most secure diplomatic traffic to and from important embassies, replacing an earlier system SIS referred to as Red. The new cypher, referred to as Purple, proved quite difficult to crack. The Navy's OP-20-G and the SIS thought it might relate to the earlier mechanical cypher machines, and the SIS set about attacking it. After spending several months studying the cyphertexts and trying to discover the underlying patterns. Eventually, in an extraordianry achievement, the SIS team figured it out. Like the some of the prior Japanese designs, Purple didn't use 'rotors' unlike the German Enigma or the Hebern design, but used stepper switches like those used in automated telephone exchanges. Leo Rosen of the SIS built a machine and, astonishingly, used the same telephone stepper switch that the Japanese designer had used.

By the end of 1940 Friedman's team at the SIS had constructed an exact duplicate of the Purple machine, even though they had never seen one. With an understanding of Purple and duplicate machines of their own to use, the SIS could then decrypt an increasing amount of the Japanese traffic. One such intercept was the message to the Japanese Embassy in Washington ordering an end (on December 7th 1941) to the negotiations with the US. The message gave a clear indication of impending war, and was to have been delivered to the US State Department only hours prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The pressure of his responsibilites, including the Purple effort was too much and Friedman entered a hospital in 1941 with a nervous breakdown. After his release, he served as Director of Communications Research for the SIS for the rest of the war. Friedman visited the British code-breaking operations at the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park in 1941. He exchanged information on the techniques for attacking Purple for the British information on how they had broken the Enigma.

Following the WWII, Friedman remained in government signals intelligence. In 1949 he became head of the code division of the newly-formed Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), and in 1952 become the chief cryptologist for the National Security Agency (NSA) when it formed to take over from the AFSA.

Friedman retired in 1956 and turned his attention, with his wife, to the problem that had originally brought them together: examining Bacon's codes. In 1957 they wrote The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, in which they demonstrated unfortunate flaws in Gallup's work. His health began to fail in the late 1960s, and he died in 1969.

Elizebeth Friedman was also heavily involved in cryptography throughout much of the inter-War period, although typically on the civilian side. During the 1920s she gained some fame for repeatedly breaking the cyphers and codes being used by "rum runners" bringing alcohol into the US during Prohibition, and in 1927 the US Coast Guard hired her to help them with their policing operations. By 1930 she had cracked over 12,000 messages for the Coast Guard, the Bureau of Customs, the Bureau of Narcotics, the Bureau of Prohibition, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and the Department of Justice.

In 1934 she became involved in a particularily odd case, in which a Canadian-registered ship, the I'm Alone, sank after being chased into international waters off the US. She decoded several messages that demonstrated that a US citizen had actually paid for the ship, which therefore had ostensibe US-ownership. The result expanded the law regarding police chases, allowing a ship involved in illegal activity to be followed into international waters, and thereby extracting the US from an embarrassing political scandal.

During World War II Elizebeth Friedman moved to the OSS and became one of their chief cryptologists. She became involved in a particularly famous case in which a husband-and-wife team were sending coded messages to the Japanese, written on dolls that the wife sold through a thriving mail-order business. Velvalee Dickinson became known as "The Doll Woman" when the case was broken to the press. Elizebeth retired after her husband's death in 1969 and lived on until 1980.

External links:

• http://www.nsa.gov/honor/w_friedman.html
• http://www.sans.org/rr/history/friedman.php

  Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "William F. Friedman."

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Thumbnail	Description & Credit	Thumbnail	Description & Credit
	[Milton Friedman, M.D.]. Credit: National Library of Medicine.		Friedman market. Front of Friedman market. Credit: Library of Congress.
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