robopanda
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Don't modern codes require stuff like satellites, or am I just being an ignorant civilian?
Changing Destiny (Kancolle)
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Whiskey Golf
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Modern codes require satellites mainly so that you can do global encrypted burst transmissions: what happens is that you record a message (voice or text), your computer encrypts it and then compresses the data into a smaller shorter burst, then it's sent over a satellite to your recipient, whose computer then decrypts and decompresses the burst back into your message. (The reason burst transmissions are a thing is so as to reduce the time spent transmitting the message, in order to defeat radio direction finding: the longer you're on air transmitting, the more time/data the other side has to find you.) And that's just plaintext, before getting into ciphers and substitutions and other things - for example, during the Cold War, the USN had a codebook for submarines making reports, where you'd have a 3-letter segment representing a word (for example, AAA means surface), so even if you broke the code, that's not going to help you much when the message you're reading is (illustrative example only) AAA MIA NHT SNS MUM LLN BBN TKI MAD ATI , and you have no clue what that means because you don't have the codebook on the other end.
On the other hand, with the USN's preference for naval officers to serve as generalist department managers rather than specialist experts, there are going to be limits to what Thompson can know and share, simply because as an officer, and furthermore as a flag officer, it's not his job to maintain specialist knowledge on systems: that's what the Chiefs and Warrant Officers are for. His job is more big picture managerial. Leadership and command.
Heck, for a more contemporary example, take Eisenhower. There were a lot of Generals who were better combat leaders than Eisenhower (Patton immediately comes to mind), but Eisenhower was successful as SACEUR because he was able to manage and leverage his combat leaders and keep all the Western Allies marching to the same drumbeat.
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ijnfleetadmiral
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That would definitely be an interesting read. I read a Rommel vs. Patton fight in Fox on the Rhine and it was quite good. (That book and it's sequel, Fox at the Front are both great books for those who like alternate history. I highly recommend them. The authors are Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson.)And how many folks would love to read a Guderian vs Patton (FIght!) battle?
baofengyu
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You also have the various 'Code Talkers' that operated in WWII, with the Navajo being most famous due to the film "Windtalkers".
And I might be wrong, but is there not a quote that says, "Amateurs study tactics, Professionals study logistics"?
Wobulator
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Of course he wouldn't be an expert on a lot of stuff- but I imagine that he'd have a very good idea of exactly what happened in WW2(what with commanding shipgirls from there), and knowing the basics of modern codes is pretty reasonable for an officer, I'd imagine. Public key cryptography, for example, would be a complete paradigm shift and is largely unbreakable by humans, and he'd almost certainly know how that works.
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Public Key cryptography, iirc, is not used for entire messages. HTTPS for instance, uses public key cryptography to authenticate the server, before switching to a new session key using symmetric cryptography. OpenPGP does this as well.
I'm also not sure that electromechanical computers can do so effectively at a rate sufficient for anything but strategic communications and at an appropriate cost.
Finally, I don't think there is really anything that needs this level of security. Code talkers worked perfectly fine: why change that?
True, although IDK if code talkers are a thing yet - and if they aren't, then it might be something that Thompson remembers at random as having been something helpful and also nigh-unbreakable, which, if nothing else, could see an early introduction of code-talking in the Navy.
Code talkers were a thing with the Creek in WWI, and it was on the back of that example that WWII code talkers were created. Thompson doesn't need to introduce anything.
Didn't know that, but at the very least getting the ball rolling on getting more code-talkers sooner might be a good thing, as IIRC it took 30 minutes to send an encrypted message without use of code-talkers, while code-talkers were able to cut the time to transmit that same message down to 20 minutes, while also sending in a code even more difficult to break.
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Depends on the message, I think. It'd take less time to call out "Stop shelling our position" than longer operational-length messages.
In the end, I think that this is another out of scope thing.
I'd like to make one more point about modern cryptography: even as someone with an interest in cryptography, I'm not arrogant enough think that I could successfully implement it in WWII, or rebuild it from scratch in the 80s. It's one thing to know that RSA is basically fancy shenanigans with modular arithmetic, but it's another to create a system that will allow for efficient information transfer.
To be honest, I doubt that Thompson would know this either, and I strongly doubt that he'd be able to recreate it and have it implemented fleet-wide.
Wobulator
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It absolutely is, especially for stuff you really care about keeping secret.
Code talking isn't exactly a great method of encryption. It's perfect for verification, but not much else, imo.
The Japanese are never going to translate from Navajo to English, of course, but they can absolutely translate from Navajo to functional orders. If you hear someone say "gini" every single time in reference to dive bombers, it's not that hard to figure out that gini means dive bomber.
Navajo works because it's fast and decently secure, at least for fine details, but it's by no means perfect.
The limiting factor on code talkers is the number of people who know the language. Not only do you need code talkers in the units that use them, but you need code talkers back at the base where they are being sent to. While Native Americans volunteered at an absurd rate for military service, we're talking about a group that on a whole provided circa 25k men in total to all branches. This is further subdivided down into groups who are not mutually intelligible (Creek code talker talking to a Navajo translator is a no-go), without even going into the fact that there were only like half a dozen native languages with enough speakers for them to be considered for code talking at all. Further consideration was given to whether there were known experts or scholarship on specific languages outside of the US.
It's rather moot anyways, I'm fairly certain the guy who got the ball rolling on it in WWII has already brought it up. The idea was very well received, mostly because it had already seen success in WWI (Where it confused the fuck out of the Germans when it was used) so it was known to work.
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I'm not sure how useful his knowledge of that will be anymore. Pearl Harbour timing has already changed hasn't it? That, the very different reception the Japanese got, and the appearance of an actual shipgirl in direct view of everyone that the Japanese even took as a kami are all significant enough events that they should all already change things enough to butterfly away any exact knowledge. And that's just what Thompson knows about. Unknown to him, the Japanese can now see kanmusu, there's an Italian one running about IIRC, and there's a whole nother time traveler futzing about in the German navy.
Like, having some general idea of how things went before could be useful, sure. It could also end up detrimental if they expect something to happen a certain way and get blindsided when it doesn't. I imagine they'd have him write out a timeline either way, pump him for all he can give them, just god knows if it will actually be useful.
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Sure, but he can probably say "the IJN is going to try and bait our carriers out into open battle- they did it last at Midway in early summer of 1942". That alone is incredibly valuable.
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That does not mean that Thompson is an expert in all areas of his command. That quote is an reflection of the reality that a flag officer's job isn't really commanding units and engaging in combat and winning battles with master strokes of genius the way Yang and Reinhard do in Legend of the Galactic Heroes. When you wear stars, your job basically boils down to managing and arranging things: directing such and such units be here here and here because the op plan calls for them to make an attack, thus you need to make sure they have X amount of ammo and Y amount of fuel, things like that. But then it's up to your staff to do the legwork of arranging the logistics of those movements, and up to the unit commanders to lead their units in combat and execute your intent.
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Let me clarify this for you. Public key cryptography is used in specific circumstances to meet specific security needs. The specific security provided by public key cryptography is asymmetrical information.
In most use cases, public keys are "key encryption keys" or used for authentication. I cannot think of any program that uses only public key cryptography for encryption. The cryptosystem probably in widest use, TLS, uses a hybrid cryptosystem instead of pure public key.
Sure, any modern cryptosystem would be nice and ensure that cryptanalysis is practically impossible, but it is impossible to realize these benefits against WWII enemies. And in any case, rubber hose cryptanalysis will beat all of these.
It is by no means perfect, but please give us a citation for when its imperfect nature actually mattered.
From what I remember, there was no Bletchley Park, or Signal Intelligence Service, or OP-20-G, equivalent in terms of investment. There's no MAGIC on the IJN/IJA's side to give them strategic information.
Before the tape recorder or other similar technologies made audio recording easily portable, how are you going to save verbal ciphertext? How are you going to disseminate this information on frequency from one unit to another?
And sure, US Naval Codes of the time may have been inferior to what we have now (Rijndael/AES, Blowfish/Twofish, Salsa20/ChaCha, etc) but using them, or rederiving them, or reimplementing them is overkill and a waste of money and more importantly, the very limited mathematician, cryptographer, and cryptanalyst time.
As with previous derails, please cease. There is a time and place for everything, and the time for public key cryptography is definitely not World War II. Give it half a century or so, and then we can talk.
baofengyu
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I was more referring to the skills of Eisenhower more than Thompson.
Wobulator
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How is this a derail?
Given that the last we knew of Thompson was him getting dragged off to tell people about his future knowledge, I think that this is plenty applicable.
Guardian's problem was that they kept sticking to it for months, even after a direct WoG telling them they were wrong.
...I mean, the exact same reason why it was only used by the Marines, and never to transmit long-term orders?
The entire point of it is that it's incredibly verifiable, decently secure, and fast. If you're getting shot at and you need your artillery to blow up the enemy, you can't spend an hour on encryption and decryption- but you can do that for, say, telling your fleet to sail to Guadalcanal.
That's fair- the IJN certainly doesn't have supercomputers.
The Germans, however, did break several allied codes, and stopping that would certainly help a lot of things. B-Dienst did a whole lot of work until Naval Cipher No. 5 came around in June 1943.
Archduke
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I have concerns with how relevant Thompson's knowledge is going to be, considering the butterflies are in full effect now. Sure, there's gonna be some stuff that he knows that will be helpful, but the problem is we, the readers, don't know what he knows, so speculating on what he could do seems like a poor idea.
The army used them in WWI as an impromptu solution to German wiretapping of allied communication lines. That they chose not to do so again in WW2 indicates they didn't feel they needed it. The lion's share of Native Americans that served in the military were in the army, so it's not for want of speakers. Expanding the code talkers to the army and navy is possible... but they chose not to historically.
Long term orders don't typically matter if you send them now or in three hours, so more traditional methods could be used that didn't require one of a very small subset of the US military be part of both the sending and receiving process. If the US suspects its codes are insecure, the typical response is to, you know, change the codes.
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I mean, Public Key Crypto is the solution to a problem decades later. My argument is that the cost and complexity (which leads to greater cost) is not worth it, even if Thompson could get in contact with relevant people, get relevant information across, remember enough relevant information, explain adequately, and a few dozen more little steps before mass production of the specialized electromechanical systems necessary.
My other argument is that PK crypto is not the right solution. We are still dealing with rotors! It might be possible to produce a system that can do the many operations necessary for even Lucifer (cryptosystem, from Demon, from Demonstration) or other early modern cipher... But this is unlikely to be usable on the field.
Honestly, I think a lot of people are just getting tired of seemingly absurd suggestions for Thompson should do X and get X done, because of Guardian. This might not be fair, but it is what the thread sentiment seems to be. I'd rather stop any further incidents early while it can get resolved without lock.
You do realized that it is very unlikely that Thompson would have the skills necessary for public-key encryption. Thompson is not a computer expert. The idea of Thompson helping create public-key encryption is like asking a random guy on the street to help build a jet aircraft. Not to mention, computer technology is not advanced enough for public-key encryption. I believe that the Colossus computer, built to help decrypt German Military Codes, would only be in service in 1943.
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Wobulator
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And I quote: An example of this would be public-key encryption.