April 19, 2004

El Qaeda substitution ciphers

The Smoking Gun has an alleged British translation of an El Qaeda training manual entitled _Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants_

Lesson 13, _Secret Writing And Ciphers And Codes_ shows the basic coding techniques that they use. In short, substitution ciphers, with some home-grown wrinkles to make it harder for the enemy.

If this were as good as it got, then claims that the terrorists use advanced cryptography would seem to be exaggerated. However, it's difficult to know for sure. How valid was the book? Who is given the book?

This is a basic soldier's manual, and thus includes a basic code that could be employed in the field, under stress. From my own military experience, working out simple encoded messages under battle conditions (in the dark, with freezing fingers, lying in a foxhole, and under fire, are all various impediments to careful coding) can be quite a fragile process, so not too much should be made of the lack of sophistication.

Also, bear in mind that your basic soldier has a lot of other things to worry about and one of the perennial problems is getting them to bother with letting the command structure know what they are up to. No soldier cares what happens at headquarters. Another factor that might shock the 90's generation of Internet cryptographers is that your basic soldiers' codes are often tactical, which means they are only secure for a day or so. They are not meant to hide information that would be stale and known by tomorrow, anyway.

How far this code is employed up the chain of command is the interesting question. My guess would be, not far, but, there is no reason for this being accurate. When I was a young soldier struggling with codes, the entire forces used a single basic code with key changes 4 times a day, presumably so that an army grunt could call in support from a ship off shore or a circling aircraft. If that grunt lost the codes, the whole forces structure was compromised, until the codes rotated outside the lost window (48 hours worth of codes might be carried at one time).

Posted by iang at April 19, 2004 09:10 AM | TrackBack
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