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Uncategorized Tuesday, December 18th 2012 at 9:30 am

Canadian Man Claims to Have Cracked Unsolvable British Pigeon Code

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Last month the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) publicly posted a WWII code found with the remains of a dead messenger pigeon. They believed that the code was uncrackable without further information, and hoped that by making the code public someone could provide the missing piece of the puzzle. That’s exactly what happened. A Canadian man says he was able to crack the code in 17 minutes with an inherited codebook. He even believes he knows who sent the message.

Gord Young from Peterborough, Ontario believes he has solved the code, which he says reveals German troop positions in Normandy, using the Royal Flying Corp aerial observers’ book he inherited from a great uncle. The GCHQ has said they would be happy to look at Young’s findings, but a representative said it would be “impossible to verify any proposed solutions, but those put forward without reference to the original cryptographic material are unlikely to be correct.”

Young even went so far as to say he identified the sender of the message as Sgt. William Stott, a Lancashire Fusilier that was sent into Normandy to send out pigeons with the location of German troops. Young says he identified Stott by the unique ID numbers he decoded in the message. Each of the approximately 250,000 pigeons used in WWII was giving an ID number, and the message Young decoded had two of them, which he says could be traced back to Stott.

The reason for the two numbers? Stott likely sent two pigeons with the same information to make sure the message was received. Considering that one of those messages was found with pigeon remains in a chimney decades after the war was over, that was probably a smart move on his part.

(via The BBC, image via kaet44)

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  • Anonymous

    The Enigma code used to be an enigma, until it got solved. This one was, too, apparently…

  • http://geekosystem.com/ Glen Tickle

    Agreed. I think I made the point in my initial post about this story that all codes are supposed to be unbreakable without the codebook. That’s the point. Giving up just because they didn’t have the book seemed lazy, but it’s also very unlikely that the information is super-relevant anymore, so maybe they just don’t want to waste resources.

  • Anonymous

    That’s right. Also, Enigma was broken by the efforts of the Allies and their respective secret Intelligence agencies, ie, O.S.S, S.O.E, etc…

  • http://geekosystem.com/ Glen Tickle

    Sorry. Meant to say “is NOT super-relevant anymore.” Are you implying that British intelligence just isn’t very good at code-breaking?

  • Anonymous

    No, After all, they had Alan Turing… Without him, the internet would not exist, because computers would not exist…
    I imagine the British are excellent at cryptography…

  • Katherine Griffiths

    First of all I am a World War 2 historian and author specalising in SIGINT and currently writing a book on a RAF Y (Wireless Intercept) Service Headquarters and in close liasion with Bletchley Park Research which is an independant research body into SIGINT.
    I don’t believe the message has been deciphered. For starters I very much doubt that a compromised WW1 codebook would have been used in WW2. The cipher looks like either a one time pad cipher (the sheet used to encode the cipher would have been destroyed by the sender immediately and since the message never reached the recipient the corresponding sheet would have also been destroyed within a couple of weeks) or a machine cipher using a machine like the TypeX machine. Bletchley Park has some of these machines but without the settings they are useless. I am more inclined to the One Time Pad which would have been and still is common in the field. The five letter blocks mean nothing as it was the standard way of enciphering amessage as it gave no clue to the length of the words of the message.
    When you consider that it would take a super computer a year to go through all the settings of a M4 Enigma machine and the TypeX was far more complex I don’t think that todays intelligence service’s can spare the computer time to crack this cipher if it is a machine cipher.
    I very much doubt that the message will be deciphered but is fun trying.