This will be long, but hope it provides more insight about the notorious numbers stations. I won't get into some of why or how I know about the (in)famous "numbers" stations. Suffice it that I routinely listened to them during the Cold War on the MF and HF bands (i.e. 300 kHz - 30 MHz). Frequency selection was based upon MF and HF radio wave propagation for smoothed sunspot number, geographic location of transmitter and the intended recipient(s), and time of day at the Great Circle midpoint between transmitter and receiver. Frequencies that would work from East to West Germany would not work from Moscow to North America,, and frequencies that would work during mid-day would not work at night. One could direction find the transmitter easily. Knowing the other data above you could get an idea of possible general geographic regions for the intended recipient, but it was far from definitive. It would have to be combined with a host of other information about the probable recipient to begin to narrow it down. At best it could be used alone to make a suspect location less likely. The intended recipient would have to know the times and frequencies on which to listen for their numbers station. Your general description of them is excellent. Some additional notes about them. Every one I encountered or was aware of, including historic, defunct stations, used a One Time Pad. Plaintext was converted to numeric plaintext using a straddling checkerboard. These varied by language being encrypted. For a specific language, there were variants. Code books were frequently used to reduce common words within the kinds of communications taking place to two, three and sometimes four digit numbers. The combination of straddling checkerboard and code book could make the ciphertext quite compact, reducing transmission time. For the morse code stations, they usually used reduced versions of the numbers. In International Morse Code, the numbers are all five dot/dash characters. Unambiguous letters similar to them with only two or three dot/dash combination were used instead. As an example, the numeral "1" is normally "* - - - -" and the cut down version used would be the letter "A", "* -", and so on with "2" = "U", "6" = "N", etc. There are examples of these online (Google for them) with some variants. The first code group transmitted usually (but not always) identifies the one time pad page being used. The pad page ID is no different from the rest of the ciphertext; it's just another code group. One of the most notorious uses of a numbers stations was the communication between Cuba and a mole within the CIA, Ana Montes. She was arrested in 2001, plead guilty in 2002 to avoid a death penalty trial, and was sentenced to 25 years. She's due to be released some time in 2023. The evidence photo of her straddling checkerboard is in the Wikipedia article about her, which they call an "encryption/decryption cheat sheet". In addition, a documentary about her also showed the shortwave receiver she used and the information they found about the Cuban numbers station schedule and frequencies for their transmissions to her. The imperative of using a one time pad once, and only once is demonstrated with the VENONA project, which ultimately decrypted a little over 2000 Soviet messages spanning 1942-1945. It resulted from the Soviets inadvertently printing duplicates of 35,000 one time pad pages during the war. Their urgent need resulted in a decision to use them, and distribute them to widely separated units/organizations in different, unrelated commands. A clear testament to the tenacity of the OSS and later CIA at the time, a few of their brightest suspected pad page reuse and an extremely arduous undertaking ensued to find the duplicate usages . . . which made decrypting both messages using the same pad page relatively trivial, in spite of a straddling checkerboard and using code book numerals. The VENONA Project unmasked Julian and Ethel Rosenberg with their co-conspirators in the early 1950's. Effort to find dupe page usage during WWII and decrypt the communication continued into the 1980's. Had the Soviets destroyed the dupe pages and replaced them, none of those intercepted one time pad messages would have been decrypted. Those that claim it can be broken don't understand one time pad and its underlying math. The two most important rules are truly random number or letter generation for the pad, and never, ever, using the same pad key twice.
@musahassan772414 күн бұрын
Much appreciated sir. I'm a year 2 student of Criminology and Security Studies and I came across "Number Stations" while reading about 'means of intelligence collection'. I decided to learn more about it and fortunately, I found this well-explained video of yours about it. I hope you can also make another video on "One-way Voice Link (OWVL)" Thank you once again! Much love from Nigeria 🇳🇬 ❤️
@CryptographyForEverybody14 күн бұрын
Heyho, thank you for your kind words. I will have a look at your proposed topic 🙂. Greetings, Nils
@timetraveller66433 жыл бұрын
This is amazing Nils! It is getting very hard to think of a cipher topic that CrypToll2 doesn't cover.
@CryptographyForEverybody3 жыл бұрын
Oh, there are many :-) We are still working on implementing cryptologic topics. Also, not every cipher has been already implemented. So a lot of work to do :-) Greetings, Nils
@timetraveller66433 жыл бұрын
Is there a master list somewhere of all the ciphers and codes implemented in CrypTool2? I want to see if I can find methods that aren't implemented yet. Also, I tried to write a numbers station reader in python with pidub, but Ct2 beat me to it! You're so fast! Well done!
@CryptographyForEverybody3 жыл бұрын
Thanks :-) Yes, there is a function overview which covers all CrypTool projects. But it is not 100% up to date. You may have a look at it here: www.cryptool.org/en/documentation/functionvolume
@12e3pi Жыл бұрын
Your digit voice data, may be an interesting sample set to expand your steganography vid(s) demonstrating beyond the 👂 while below the static noise for the possible existence of subliminal 'burst' message transmissions.
@Chris_Hetherington3 жыл бұрын
I was waiting on this
@HeyWh2 жыл бұрын
As of March of 2021: G06 fully Retired from Service. There is no more German Stations Active.
@HeyWh2 жыл бұрын
It is truly sad to see something that's been around longer than most German Number Stations just vanish like that.
@CryptographyForEverybody2 жыл бұрын
I think with the Internet and mobile networks today, number stations are becoming more and more obsolete.
@HeyWh2 жыл бұрын
@@CryptographyForEverybody Either that, or they just done away with German Stations, wonder whats being threatened next.
@HeyWh2 жыл бұрын
And BTW Weird Pronunciation of English Numbers, Some Good Examples are E11/E11a (Oblique) (Fiver, Niner, Do), and E25 (Rebeat) (Five-uh, Niner(Roll), Four(Roll), Zero (Zelo) and the Last Digit in Message, not Call Up, is Inflicted.)
@emergencyrussell3 жыл бұрын
I have a feature request: keyboard shortcuts for those big starting and stopping execution buttons. What fascinates me is how the secret agent recipients of these number station messages might have received the key to the encryption. There's so much risk involved with key distribution.
@CryptographyForEverybody3 жыл бұрын
Hiho, CrypTool 2 (and all other CrypTools) offer shortcuts for all their functions. You will see the shortcut by keeping the mouse cursor over a button (or any clickable ui element). To start the execution of a workspace, press F5, to stop it, press Ctrl + F5. Concerning the keys: Yes, you are right. Distributing keys and (cipher manuals) was a risk. They probably also used other ciphers (despite one-time-pads) in the past. In more modern times, they used computer programs to decrypt the ciphers (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station#Atenci%C3%B3n_spy_case - cite: "... typing the numbers into laptop computers to decode spying instructions."). Also, Soviet spies (probably) used the so-called VIC cipher (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIC_cipher). We have also an implementation of the VIC cipher in CT2 :-) Greetings, Nils
@emergencyrussell3 жыл бұрын
@@CryptographyForEverybody Ah, vielen Dank. I wasn't getting alt text for some reason. I see it now. "Under no circumstances should [agents] German nor Castor fly with BTTR or another organization on days 24, 25, 26 and 27." "On February 24, 1996, two of the Brothers to the Rescue Cessna Skymasters involved in releasing leaflets to fall on Cuba, were shot down by a Cuban Air Force MiG-29UB." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_to_the_Rescue#1996_shootdown_incident/ 👀
@CryptographyForEverybody3 жыл бұрын
Interesting story :-)
@James_Bowie3 жыл бұрын
Great stuff! Just one comment: the visualization of the Morse Code running from right to left is quite counter-intuitive given that oscilloscopes, etc, scan from left to right, and most of us also write from left to right.
@CryptographyForEverybody2 жыл бұрын
Hiho, Thank you :-) I dont actually understand the problem. I think that an oscilloscope first fills the screen, but then shifts the window to the right (time) over the signal. The visualization does the same but does not fill the screen at first. Do you get what I mean :-) ? Greetings, Nils
@ClaudioMalagrino3 жыл бұрын
Thank you! I created a "cipher" for my animation, Blue Angel Series, but letters from the Phonetic Alphabet are used. The main character, Angel, tunes in a "letters station" in order to get a code. I would like to develop an algorithm for this cipher.
@CryptographyForEverybody3 жыл бұрын
Hi Claudio Malagrino, Cool :-) You could create your own nomenclature cipher (or a homophonic cipher) as described in my video here, using CrypTool 2 (these ciphers may be also based only on digits): kzfaq.info/get/bejne/e56FisWgncfco3k.html If you need a more "fancy" cipher, you could create a pigpen cipher (see kzfaq.info/get/bejne/e56FisWgncfco3k.html) or use some other fantasy symbols instead of the pigpen symbols. Leave a message if you need further help, ideas, or advices :-) Greetings, Nils
@ClaudioMalagrino3 жыл бұрын
@@CryptographyForEverybody Thanks, I'll check this out!
@andypuma67323 жыл бұрын
Hat die Minustaste bei der Eingabe der URL geklemmt? ;-) www.numbers-stations.com/e03/
@CryptographyForEverybody3 жыл бұрын
Nein, aber danke für den Hinweis. Ich schreibe die Texte inkl URLs etc vor. Aber das KZfaq-Studio macht alles mögliche daraus... :-)