Sigsaly: Churchill's top secret hotline to the President

(iwm.org.uk)

54 points | by stmw 3 days ago

6 comments

  • AlexCoventry 3 minutes ago
    IIRC from Prof: Alan Turing Decoded, Turing was sent to the US to work on this for a while, but wasn't able to contribute much, because the Americans didn't really trust him.
  • Merrill 24 minutes ago
    A 1983 review of this remarkable system for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) attributes no fewer than eight "firsts" to SIGSALY. They are as follows:

    1) The first realization of enciphered telephony

    2) The first quantized speech transmission

    3) The first transmission of speech by Pulse Code Modulation (PCM)

    4) The first use of companded PCM

    5) The first examples of multilevel Frequency Shift Keying (FSK)

    6) The first useful realization of speech bandwidth compression

    7) The first use of FSK - FDM (Frequency Shift Keying-Frequency Division Multiplex) as a viable transmission method over a fading medium

    8) The first use of a multilevel "eye pattern" to adjust the sampling intervals (a new, and important, instrumentation technique)

    From https://www.jproc.ca/crypto/sigsaly1.html

    I think that the relevant patents remained classified until 1975.

  • prathje 59 minutes ago
    A great example of a one-time pad!

    There is an illustration for the encryption process in Appendix B here: https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/about/cryptologic-h...

  • jgrahamc 54 minutes ago
    Also, worth reading about is Turing's Delilah speech encryption system: https://spectrum.ieee.org/alan-turings-delilah
  • kachnuv_ocasek 58 minutes ago
    * US president
  • excannuk 56 minutes ago
    [dead]