Secret message is impossible to decode “without access to the original cryptographic material, experts say.
Britain’s best and brightest code breakers have all given up on trying to figure out what they say is a WWII code that is “impossible to decode” .
“Cryptographers at Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the spy agency in charge of signals intelligence, have been analyzing the short handwritten message for weeks but threw up their hands Friday, saying it will be impossible to decode “without access to the original cryptographic material. The note, written on official stationary with the heading “Pigeon Service,” was discovered in a red canister attached to the skeletal leg of a pigeon in a chimney in Surrey. The message is made up of 27 seemingly random five-letter blocks and though it’s undated, government analysts believe the pigeon met his end while on a secret mission during the Second World War. The note is signed “Sjt W Stot” and was intended for the destination “XO2.”
In a statement released overnight, the GCHQ said that “during the war, secret communications would often utilize specialized codebooks “in which each code group of four or five letters had a meaning relevant to a specific operation, allowing much information to be sent in a short message.” The GCHQ said that those messages may have been put through an additional layer of security by being re-coded with what’s known as a one-time pad” (source: Can You Help Spies Crack ‘Impossible’ WWII Pigeon Code http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/11/can-you-help-spies-crack-impossible-wwii-pigeon-code/ ).
See video: Secret code found with WWII pigeon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv7UXi_XQJk