Swedish analysis of Nazi crypto TTYs

This talk will describe how a team of Swedish cryptanalysts broke the electromechanical cryptographic teleprinter “Siemens & Halske T52” which was used by the Germans during World War II for “important” traffic. It contained a stream cipher implementation much more sophisticated than the substitution engine of the well-known Enigma. The talk will focus on reconstructing how the Swedes, specifically the key figure of Arne Beurling, could have gotten the ideas for breaking the cipher—a process about which next to no historical accounts exist.

• Sven Moritz Hallberg