SIGSALY - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Cryptography

Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...

, SIGSALY (also known as the X System, Project X, Ciphony I, and the Green Hornet) was a secure speech

Secure voice

Secure voice is a term in cryptography for the encryption of voice communication over a range of communication types such as radio, telephone or IP.-History:...

system used in World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

for the highest-level Allied

Allies

In everyday English usage, allies are people, groups, or nations that have joined together in an association for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not explicit agreement has been worked out between them...

communications.

It pioneered a number of digital communications concepts, including the first transmission of speech using pulse-code modulation

Pulse-code modulation

Pulse-code modulation is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form for digital audio in computers and various Blu-ray, Compact Disc and DVD formats, as well as other uses such as digital telephone systems...

.

The name SIGSALY was not an acronym, but a cover name that resembled an acronym—the SIG part was common in Army Signal Corps names (eg, SIGABA

SIGABA

In the history of cryptography, the ECM Mark II was a cipher machine used by the United States for message encryption from World War II until the 1950s...

). The prototype was called the "Green Hornet" after the popular radio show The Green Hornet
The Green Hornet
The Green Hornet is an American radio and television masked vigilante created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker, with input from radio director James Jewell, in 1936. Since his radio debut in the 1930s, the Green Hornet has appeared in numerous serialized dramas in a wide variety of media...

, because it sounded like a buzzing hornet

Hornet

Hornets are the largest eusocial wasps; some species can reach up to in length. The true hornets make up the genus Vespa and are distinguished from other vespines by the width of the vertex , which is proportionally larger in Vespa and by the anteriorly rounded gasters .- Life cycle :In...

— resembling the show's theme tune — to anyone trying to eavesdrop on the conversation.

Development

At the time of its inception, long distance telephone communications were broadcast using the "A-3" voice scrambler developed by AT&T

AT&T

AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...

. The Germans had a listening station on the Dutch coast which could intercept and break A-3 traffic .

Although telephone scrambler

Scrambler

In telecommunications, a scrambler is a device that transposes or inverts signals or otherwise encodes a message at the transmitter to make the message unintelligible at a receiver not equipped with an appropriately set descrambling device...

s were used by both sides in World War II, they were known not to be very secure in general, and both sides often cracked the scrambled conversations of the other. Inspection of the audio spectrum using a spectrum analyzer

Spectrum analyzer

A spectrum analyzer measures the magnitude of an input signal versus frequency within the full frequency range of the instrument. The primary use is to measure the power of the spectrum of known and unknown signals...

often provided significant clues to the scrambling technique. The insecurity of most telephone scrambler schemes led to the development of a more secure scrambler, based on the one-time pad

One-time pad

In cryptography, the one-time pad is a type of encryption, which has been proven to be impossible to crack if used correctly. Each bit or character from the plaintext is encrypted by a modular addition with a bit or character from a secret random key of the same length as the plaintext, resulting...

principle.

A prototype was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories

Bell Labs

Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

, better known as "Bell Labs", under the direction of A. B. Clark, assisted by British mathematician Alan Turing

Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...

(see external link 1, below), and demonstrated to the US Army. The Army was impressed and awarded Bell Labs a contract for two systems in 1942. SIGSALY went into service in 1943 and remained in service until 1946.

Operation

SIGSALY used a random

Randomness

Randomness has somewhat differing meanings as used in various fields. It also has common meanings which are connected to the notion of predictability of events....

noise

Noise

In common use, the word noise means any unwanted sound. In both analog and digital electronics, noise is random unwanted perturbation to a wanted signal; it is called noise as a generalisation of the acoustic noise heard when listening to a weak radio transmission with significant electrical noise...

mask to encrypt

Encryption

In cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information using an algorithm to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key. The result of the process is encrypted information...

voice conversations which had been encoded by a vocoder

Vocoder

A vocoder is an analysis/synthesis system, mostly used for speech. In the encoder, the input is passed through a multiband filter, each band is passed through an envelope follower, and the control signals from the envelope followers are communicated to the decoder...

. The latter was used both to minimize the amount of redundancy (which is high in voice traffic), and also to reduce the amount of information to be encrypted.

The voice conversation was first encoded by the vocoder as:

ten low-frequency
Frequency
Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency.The period is the duration of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency...

(less than 25 Hz
Hertz
The hertz is the SI unit of frequency defined as the number of cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon. One of its most common uses is the description of the sine wave, particularly those used in radio and audio applications....

) signals, giving the amplitude
Amplitude
Amplitude is the magnitude of change in the oscillating variable with each oscillation within an oscillating system. For example, sound waves in air are oscillations in atmospheric pressure and their amplitudes are proportional to the change in pressure during one oscillation...

in ten separate frequency bands, which together covered the telephone passband (250 Hz - 2,950 Hz);
another signal indicating whether the sound is voiced
Phonation
Phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, phonation is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the definition used among those who study laryngeal anatomy and physiology...

or unvoiced
Phonation
Phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, phonation is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the definition used among those who study laryngeal anatomy and physiology...

;
if voiced, a signal indicating the pitch
Pitch (music)
Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...

; this also varied at less than 25 Hz.

Next, each signal was sampled for its amplitude once every 20 milliseconds. For the band amplitude signals, the amplitude converted into one of six amplitude levels, with values from 0 through 5. The amplitude levels were on a nonlinear scale, with the steps between levels wide at low amplitudes and narrower at high amplitudes. This scheme, known as "companding" or "compressing-expanding", exploits the fact that the fidelity of voice signals is more sensitive to high amplitudes than to low amplitudes. The pitch signal, which required greater sensitivity, was encoded by a pair of six-level values (one coarse, and one fine), giving thirty-six levels in all.

A cryptographic key

Key (cryptography)

In cryptography, a key is a piece of information that determines the functional output of a cryptographic algorithm or cipher. Without a key, the algorithm would produce no useful result. In encryption, a key specifies the particular transformation of plaintext into ciphertext, or vice versa...

, consisting of a series of random values from the same set of six levels, was subtracted from each sampled voice amplitude value to encrypt them before transmission. The subtraction was performed using modular arithmetic

Modular arithmetic

In mathematics, modular arithmetic is a system of arithmetic for integers, where numbers "wrap around" after they reach a certain value—the modulus....

: a "wraparound" fashion, meaning that if there was a negative result, it was added to six to give a positive result. For example, if the voice amplitude value was 3 and the random value was 5, then the subtraction would work as follows:

— giving a value of 4.

The sampled value was then transmitted, with each sample level transmitted on one of six corresponding frequencies in a frequency band, a scheme known as "frequency-shift keying

Frequency-shift keying

Frequency-shift keying is a frequency modulation scheme in which digital information is transmitted through discrete frequency changes of a carrier wave. The simplest FSK is binary FSK . BFSK uses a pair of discrete frequencies to transmit binary information. With this scheme, the "1" is called...

(FSK)". The receiving SIGSALY read the frequency values, converted them into samples, and added the key values back to them to decrypt them. The addition was also performed in a "modulo" fashion, with six subtracted from any value over five. To match the example above, if the receiving SIGSALY got a sample value of 4 with a matching random value of 5, then the addition would be as follows:

— which gives the correct value of 3.

To convert the samples back into a voice waveform, they were first turned back into the dozen low-frequency vocoded signals. An inversion of the vocoder process was employed, which included:

a white noise
White noise
White noise is a random signal with a flat power spectral density. In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency...

source (used for unvoiced sounds);
a signal generator (used for voiced sounds) generating a set of harmonic
Harmonic
A harmonic of a wave is a component frequency of the signal that is an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency, i.e. if the fundamental frequency is f, the harmonics have frequencies 2f, 3f, 4f, . . . etc. The harmonics have the property that they are all periodic at the fundamental...

s, with the base frequency controlled by the pitch signal;
a switch, controlled by the voiced/unvoiced signal, to select one of these two as a source;
a set of filters (one for each band), all taking as input the same source (the source selected by the switch), along with amplifiers whose gain
Gain
In electronics, gain is a measure of the ability of a circuit to increase the power or amplitude of a signal from the input to the output. It is usually defined as the mean ratio of the signal output of a system to the signal input of the same system. It may also be defined on a logarithmic scale,...

was controlled by the band amplitude signals.

The noise values used for the encryption key were originally produced by large mercury

Mercury (element)

Mercury is a chemical element with the symbol Hg and atomic number 80. It is also known as quicksilver or hydrargyrum...

-vapor rectifying vacuum tube

Vacuum tube

In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube , or thermionic valve , reduced to simply "tube" or "valve" in everyday parlance, is a device that relies on the flow of electric current through a vacuum...

s and stored on a phonograph

Phonograph

The phonograph record player, or gramophone is a device introduced in 1877 that has had continued common use for reproducing sound recordings, although when first developed, the phonograph was used to both record and reproduce sounds...

record. The record was then duplicated, with the records being distributed to SIGSALY systems on both ends of a conversation. The records served as the SIGSALY "one-time pad", and distribution was very strictly controlled (although if one had been seized, it would have been of little importance, since only one pair of each was ever produced). For testing and setup purposes, a pseudo-random number generating system made out of relays, known as the "threshing machine", was used.

The records were played on turntable

Phonograph

s, but since the timing – the clock synchronization

Clock synchronization

Clock synchronization is a problem from computer science and engineering which deals with the idea that internal clocks of several computers may differ. Even when initially set accurately, real clocks will differ after some amount of time due to clock drift, caused by clocks counting time at...

– between the two SIGSALY terminals had to be precise, the turntables were by no means just ordinary record-players. The rotation rate of the turntables was carefully controlled, and the records were started at highly specific times, based on precision time-of-day clock standards. Since each record only provided 12 minutes of key

Key (cryptography)

, each SIGSALY had two turntables, with a second record "queued up" while the first was "playing".

Usage

The SIGSALY terminal was massive. Consisting of 40 racks of equipment, it weighed over 50 tons, and used about 30 kW of power, necessitating an air-conditioned room to hold it. Too big and cumbersome for general use, it was only used for the highest level of voice communications.

A dozen SIGSALY terminal installations were eventually set up all over the world. One was installed in a ship and followed General Douglas MacArthur

Douglas MacArthur

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was an American general and field marshal of the Philippine Army. He was a Chief of Staff of the United States Army during the 1930s and played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II. He received the Medal of Honor for his service in the...

during his South Pacific

Oceania

Oceania is a region centered on the islands of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Conceptions of what constitutes Oceania range from the coral atolls and volcanic islands of the South Pacific to the entire insular region between Asia and the Americas, including Australasia and the Malay Archipelago...

campaigns. It supported about 3,000 high-level telephone conferences. The encrypted phone link between the US President and Churchill in WW2 was probably an example of SIGSALY.

The system was cumbersome, but it worked very effectively. When the Allies invaded Germany, an investigative team discovered that the Germans had recorded significant amounts of traffic from the system, but had erroneously concluded that it was a complex telegraphic encoding system.

Significance

SIGSALY has been credited with a number of "firsts"; this list is taken from (Bennett, 1983):

The first realization of enciphered telephony
The first quantized speech transmission
The first transmission of speech by pulse code modulation (PCM)
The first use of companded
Companding
In telecommunication, signal processing, and thermodynamics, companding is a method of mitigating the detrimental effects of a channel with limited dynamic range...

PCM
The first examples of multilevel frequency shift keying (FSK)
The first useful realization of speech bandwidth compression
The first use of FSK - FDM (Frequency Shift Keying-Frequency Division Multiplex) as a viable transmission method over a fading medium
The first use of a multilevel "eye pattern" to adjust the sampling intervals (a new, and important, instrumentation technique)

In popular culture

SIGSALY was featured in Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson

Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction.Difficult to categorize, his novels have been variously referred to as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, and postcyberpunk...

's novel Cryptonomicon
Cryptonomicon
Cryptonomicon is a 1999 novel by American author Neal Stephenson. The novel follows the exploits of two groups of people in two different time periods, presented in alternating chapters...

, in a conversation between the fictional character Lawrence Waterhouse and the historical character Alan Turing.

External links

"The SIGSALY story"
"The start of the digital revolution"
Images and description of SIGSALY
Ralph Miller is credited with a number of the related patents documented in Volume II of A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System.