From Wikipedia: "In the history of cryptography, 91-shiki injiki (System 91 Printing Machine) or Angoki Taipu-A ("Type A Cipher Machine"), codenamed Red by the United States, was a diplomatic cryptographic machine used by the Japanese Foreign Office before and during World War II. A relatively simple device, it was quickly broken by western cryptographers. The Red cipher was succeeded by the "Purple" machine ("97-shiki obun inji-ki") which used some of the same principles. Parallel usage of the two systems assisted in the breaking of the Purple system.
The Red cypher should not be confused with the Red naval code, which was used by the Imperial Japanese Navy between the wars. The latter was a codebook system, not a cipher.
OPERATION
The Red machine encrypted and decrypted texts written in Latin characters
(alphabetic only) for transmission through the cable services. These services
charged a lower rate for texts that could be pronounced than for random
strings of characters; therefore the machine produced telegraph code by
encyphering the vowels separately from the consonants, so that the text
remained a series of syllables.] (The letter "Y" was treated as a vowel.)
The "sixes and twenties" effect (as American analysts referred to it) was
a major weakness which the Japanese continued in the Purple system.
Encryption itself was provided through a single half-rotor; input
contacts were through slip rings, each of which connected to a single output
contact on the rotor.] Since both the vowels and consonants were passed
through the same rotor, it had sixty contacts (the least common multiple
of six and twenty); wiring ensured that the two groups were kept separate.
The slip rings were connected to the input keyboard through a plugboard;
again this was organized to keep the vowels and consonants separate.]
The rotor turned at least one step after each letter. The amount
of rotation was controlled by the break wheel, which was connected to the
rotor, and which had up to forty-seven pins in it. Up to eleven of these
pins (in a predetermined set of positions) were removable; in practice,
from four to six pins were removed. Rotation of the wheel stopped when
the next pin was reached; therefore, if the next pin were removed, the
rotor would advance two places instead of one.] The irregular pattern of
rotation produced an Alberti cipher.
HISTORY
The vulnerability of Japanese code systems was made public in 1931 when Herbert Yardley published The American Black Chamber, a popular account of his code breaking activities for the US government in which he discussed the breaking of Japanese codes and their use during the Washington Naval Conference. These revelations prompted Japanese to look into machine cyphers.
The system was introduced in 1930-1931 (the 91 in the designation refers to the Japanese Imperial Year 2591), using a reverse-engineered version of a machine supplied by the firm of Boris Hagelin. Hagelin's most sophisticated systems were rotor machines similar to those used in World War II, but as he did not trust the Japanese to honor his patents, he sent a more primitive device designed by Arvid Damm instead. It was this machine which the Japanese used as the basis for their design; the separate encryption of the vowels, however, was strictly a Japanese contribution.
The code was broken successfully by three independently working groups. The British solution came first, with Hugh Foss and Oliver Strachey working out the code in 1934, and Harold Kenworthy's shop producing a replica, the "J machine", a year later American attempts to break the system waited until 1935. In the Army SIS group, the system was broken by Frank Rowlett and Solomon Kullback; for the navy, Agnes Driscoll is generally credited. (She actually solved the Orange (or M-1) cipher used by naval attaches, but as it turned out the two systems were essentially the same.) The Americans also constructed a replica machine to expedite solutions; interestingly, this machine had two half-rotors to solve the vowels and consonants separately. The SIS group originally referred to it simply as the "Japanese code machine", but decided that so descriptive a term was a security risk; as it was the first Japanese machine cipher solved, they decided to start at the beginning of the spectrum, and named it "RED".
The PURPLE machine began to replace the RED system in 1938, but initial installations were at major posts; less important embassies and consulates continued to use the old system. This was one of many deficiencies in Japanese use of encryption that helped make the PURPLE system vulnerable to cracking, for now there was some identical traffic on both systems, which allowed cribbing. A far more serious deficiency was that the PURPLE machine maintained the "sixes/twenties" division, even though the RED machines had since been modified to allow any six letters to be used for the vowel encryption. After eighteen months of work, the PURPLE device was cracked, and produced important intelligence up to the end of the war.
Intelligence results of RED intercepts were not as dramatic, but
important intelligence was obtained. For instance, American cryptanalysts
were able to provide details of the Tripartite Pact between the Axis powers.
Reports of the sea trials of the battleship Nagato were also decoded, leading
to important changes to the USS North Carolina (BB-55), then being designed,
in order to match the performance of the Japanese ship".
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| Overall view of the Japanese Red. Below are closeups of each section. |
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| The U.S. Navy captured this Japanese cipher machine . Like its diplomatic counterpart, the Navy machine separated the "alphabet" into two subgroups. However, instead of using the Romanized spellings, it had a Katakana keyboard. It is believed that the difficulty in using and maintaining Red resulted in little use by the Japanese fleet. (All photos in this table by Ralph Simpson). |