B-211 (machine)

B-211 is the name of an electromechanical rotor cipher machine that was developed around 1932 by the Swede Boris Hagelin (1892–1983) at the Swedish company AB Cryptograph .

history

→ Main article : B-21 (machine)

The company AB Cryptograph ( AB is an abbreviation for Swedish Aktiebolaget , German  stock corporation , and Cryptograph refers to the field of "secret typewriters") was founded in Stockholm in 1915 by Hagelin's compatriot Arvid Damm (1869-1927) . Boris Hagelin joined the company in 1922 and developed his first encryption machine there in 1925 with the prototype of the B-21 . In the following years he took care of the sales of his machine and made a number of trips abroad. The French army in particular showed interest, but required a printing function.

Thereupon Hagelin temporarily replaced the lamp field of the B-21 with a type wheel printing unit and named the new machine the B-211. The plain or ciphertext was printed on a strip of paper. In contrast to the forerunner B-21 and also to many other encryption machines, such as the German Enigma , the B-211 did not only work with letters. Although it always generated letters as ciphertext , the plain text could also contain digits and some special characters .

Even before the Second World War , 500 B-211s were manufactured and delivered. After the war, the French army ordered another 100 copies.

Russian variant

Instead of the 5 × 5 switching matrices known from the B-21 and also used in the B-211, 5 × 6 matrices were used in the Russian variant.

Before the war, two machines had gone to the Russian trade delegation in Stockholm. These were analyzed shortly afterwards in the Soviet Union and reconstructed in a modified form (see also: “Photo of the reconstructed B-211 for Cyrillic alphabet” under web links). The most important change was the expansion of the 5 × 5 switching matrices  (picture) to 5 × 6. This made it possible to encode the higher number of letters in the Cyrillic alphabet compared to the Latin alphabet . The keyboard and printer have also been adapted accordingly.

literature

• Klaus Schmeh : Code breakers versus code makers - The fascinating history of encryption. W3l-Verlag 2008, ISBN 3-86834-044-0 , p. 199.

Web links

• Photo of the B-211 accessed September 17, 2018.
• Boris Hagelin: The History of the Hagelin Cryptos. PDF; 9.9 MB Zug 1979, accessed on September 17, 2018.
• Photo of the replica B-211 for the Cyrillic alphabet, accessed September 17, 2018.
• Excerpts from the manual of the B-211 (English), accessed on September 17, 2018.
• B-211 from Jean-François Bouchaudy, accessed September 17, 2018.
• B-211 in the Crypto Museum , accessed September 17, 2018.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Boris Hagelin: The history of the Hagelin cryptos. Zug 1979, pp. 20-21.
2. ↑ Boris Hagelin: The history of the Hagelin cryptos. Zug 1979, pp. 21-22.