[Cryptography] Would anybody like to participate in a Bletchley Park wargame?

[Ray Dillinger]

I have the idea of a wargame reenacting an alternate version of WWII,
with some of the players playing the part of the Axis, only with
different and better crypto machines to compensate for the codebreakers
having real computers. It would start with comically bad use and
management of those machines, but get less bad the longer it goes on.
The rest of the players would be playing the part of Allied codebreakers.

The cipher machines would be in 'easy', 'intermediate', 'advanced', and
'impossible' categories - judged against modern, rather than period,
state of the art, where the allied codebreakers all have modern
computers. Just for nostalgia value, we could even use the actual naval
Enigma from late in the war as the opening 'easy' crack. Everything
above the 'easy' category would be out of reach of an ordinary
exhaustive key search; you'd have to actually have an insight to get them.

They would all be straightforward, buildable electromechanical devices.
I'd cheerfully provide diagrams and schematics and simulations and test
vectors of about two-thirds of them to the Allied players before the
exercise starts, reflecting real Allied knowledge at the opening of the
war. A few would be rotor machines, but most would not. In this version
of the universe the Axis powers contracted different designers for their
main crypto devices. A few would be mysteries until/unless someone
figures them out.

We'd need some people to game WWII under some fairly detailed wargame
rules to give us a 'reality' for the messages to be about. The Allies
would be aware of newspaper stories and intel about troop deployments
etc. The idea is to make the details of that game into the basic input
for the one we'd be playing - making lots of cribs available including
names of officers, unit designations, names of ships, etc...

				Bear

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