Enigma of multi-lingual Soviet encryption machine revealed: The Fialka

May 12, 2019 9:08 AM

"In the early days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union needed a foolproof way to encrypt the messages it sent to its allies....Enter the Fialka" (Anna Borshchevskaya, Foreign Policy). It was an electromechanical wheel-based cipher machine, with country-specific variants, and was used from 1956 to the early 1990s. Want to see this state secret in person? Visit a Fialka at the KGB Espionage Museum in New York.
posted by MonkeyToes (5 comments total)

a foolproof way

…as the NSA developed more powerful computers, the US was able to decrypt Fialka traffic with relative ease by the 1970’s (Courtois, 2012).

The increasing complexity of electromechanical ciphers using rotor technology had its limitations. Israel captured a machine during the 6 Day War in 1967, and the NSA built a computer to decrypt Fialka traffic fairly easily (Courtois, 2012).

posted by zamboni at 9:43 AM on May 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

I guess the Soviets never tried a code talker approach as the U.S. and, Wikipedia is telling me, the Chinese and modern Egyptians did? They certainly had enough minority languages with low native-speaker populations thanks to colonialism. Perhaps it happened but just hasn't been documented yet.
posted by XMLicious at 11:04 AM on May 12, 2019 [3 favorites]

The article had a (brief) quote from someone that wrote a book about cryptographers. In fairness, given that the quoted author was an editor at Cryptologia, he probably had a lot more to say than that quote. The claims of "unbreakability" should have dictated a search for a few more comments, but that would probably doubled the length of the article.

What was inarguably complex was the Foreign Policy web page--fourteen domains with executable content.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 11:10 AM on May 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

>They certainly had enough minority languages with low native-speaker populations thanks to colonialism.

You need more than just colonialism to get code talkers: you need for the dominant culture to believe that colonialism is over and that the speakers of these languages are loyal, trustworthy citizens. The USSR had far less trust of most of its ethnic minority groups.
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 11:43 AM on May 12, 2019 [9 favorites]

the KGB Espionage Museum in New York

I'm just amazed that this even exists! I mean... who, how and why?
posted by sjswitzer at 11:55 AM on May 12, 2019 [1 favorite]