Encryption in the Zimmerman Telegram
Doing some research about the "Zimmermann Telegram" (image shown below) and then answer the following questions:
1) Which technique was used in encrypting this telegram: substitution, transposition/permutation or steganography?
2) If you were an intelligence officer, what lessons you could learn from this "weak" encryption?
(There is no need to decrypt the telegram yourself. It requires lots of efforts to solve this puzzle, even though the classical encryption technique dates back to a hundred years ago.)
Image of Zimmermann Telegram: zimmermann.jpg
1. Upon doing my own research, since I do not know anything about encryption, Ibelieve the technique used in encrypting this specific telegram is substitution. I came to this reasoning because transposition involves the positioning of the letters/numbers, such as columnar positioning and includes a more complicated order; steganography is when a hidden message is part of something else, like an image, article, in a list or other form of language. Stenography is intended to not attract attention to the message itself. The specific telegram we are looking at obviously looks coded and is not covert at all, that is how I ruled out stenography. I ruled out transposition because our telegram’s codes are positioned as if each set of numbers is a word. Then the signature at the end definitely leads me to believe it is the format of a letter.
2. If I was an intelligence officer, something I could learn from this weak encryption is that if I need to send a message, I need to definitely use something more complex, because when using substitution, once someone catches on to the pattern, it will get easier and easier to code the message . Honestly, I would use stenography as much as possible.
1) Which technique was used in encrypting this telegram: substitution, transposition/permutation or steganography?
2) If you were an intelligence officer, what lessons you could learn from this "weak" encryption?
(There is no need to decrypt the telegram yourself. It requires lots of efforts to solve this puzzle, even though the classical encryption technique dates back to a hundred years ago.)
Image of Zimmermann Telegram: zimmermann.jpg
1. Upon doing my own research, since I do not know anything about encryption, Ibelieve the technique used in encrypting this specific telegram is substitution. I came to this reasoning because transposition involves the positioning of the letters/numbers, such as columnar positioning and includes a more complicated order; steganography is when a hidden message is part of something else, like an image, article, in a list or other form of language. Stenography is intended to not attract attention to the message itself. The specific telegram we are looking at obviously looks coded and is not covert at all, that is how I ruled out stenography. I ruled out transposition because our telegram’s codes are positioned as if each set of numbers is a word. Then the signature at the end definitely leads me to believe it is the format of a letter.
2. If I was an intelligence officer, something I could learn from this weak encryption is that if I need to send a message, I need to definitely use something more complex, because when using substitution, once someone catches on to the pattern, it will get easier and easier to code the message . Honestly, I would use stenography as much as possible.