M-130 (encryption machine)

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The M-130 , also called Koralle , was a Soviet rotor cipher machine that was introduced in 1965, at the height of the Cold War , and issued to the allied states of the Warsaw Pact . She was to encryption of digits conceived and served for the secret transmission of weather data .

technology

Schematic representation of the feedback loops

The machine is somewhat similar to the Enigma-Z from the early 1930s , but is cryptographically much stronger. In contrast to its German predecessor, it contains feedback loops for the current flow through the roller set. (This was also what made the Swedish HX-63 , manufactured in the 1950s, stand out.) This makes the flow of current much more complicated and consequently the encryption much stronger than with the Enigma. In addition, the cryptographic security of the machine was strengthened by an irregular roll advance , which the German predecessor also did not have. In addition, it not only has a single plug board , like the Enigma, but has two plug boards , one at the input and the second at the output. Here, too, she overcame another weakness of the Enigma, namely the double-pole involutive cables, and used single-pole plug-in cables instead.

The M-130 has three operating modes, which are identified with the Cyrillic letters "О", "З" and "Р". These stand for “plain text” ( Russian Открытый Текст ), “encrypt” ( Russian ЗашифроватЬ ) and “decrypt” ( Russian РасшифровыватЬ ). You can switch between the operating modes using a rotary knob on the right-hand side. Like its German predecessor, the M-130 has a numeric keypad with the following key sequence: 

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   0

There are also three other keys, namely for the letter X, the minus sign and the carriage return . Spaces are automatically inserted after every five characters, thus forming groups of five. One advantage of using digits is that text messages in any language can also be encrypted in this way if they are overencrypted with the help of numbers in a first process step (like diplomatic codes ) .

Immediately behind the keyboard, in the front part of the machine, is the removable encryption unit, which is mounted on a solid aluminum plate. There are five rotatable rotors with 30 electrical contacts on each side. Each time the button is pressed, the middle rotor (3) is advanced by one position, while the two outer (1 and 5) are individually incremented or not incremented depending on small steering wheels with freely releasable pins. The other two rotors (2 and 4) rotate backwards and are also advanced irregularly. Left and right outside the set of rollers there is a stator (fixed roller) with 30 contacts on the inner side but only ten contacts on the outer side. The stators serve as an entry or exit roller (with 10 through contacts) and as reflectors (with 20 internal contacts). In addition, there is a connector board with ten cables each at the input and output.

If you press a button, the current first flows through the connector board at the input and one digit is permuted (swapped) there by another . The current then reaches the roller set via one of ten through contacts of the first stator and is swapped several times by the five rotors. It is then fed back into the roller set through the output stator and passes through it a second time, now in the opposite direction. Then it is “reflected” by the input stator and flows a third time through all five rollers, now again in the forward direction. Then it leaves the roller set through the output stator and reaches the connector board at the output. A final permutation takes place here.

Very few surviving specimens are known. One is in the possession of the Austrian collector Peter Klampferer, who gave employees of the Dutch Crypto Museum the opportunity to examine the machine in 2010 and 2011 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ M-130 in the Crypto Museum (English), accessed on July 5, 2017.