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Here is a list of past presentations at ICCH. The most recent presentation is at the top. Click on each listing to reveal more information below, including the speaker, presentation description and to access recordings.
Note: Effort has been made to ensure that the information on each presentation is accurate and up-to-date. To suggest a correction please contact the ICCH webmaster Patrick Hayes at .
In World War I, the German diplomatic services and the Imperial Navy employed codebooks as the primary means for encoding confidential communications over telegraph and radio channels. The Entente cryptographic services were able to reconstruct most of those codebooks, to obtain copies of others, and to overcome various enhancements introduced by the Germans. A collection of diplomatic and naval attaché cryptograms from and to the German consulate in Genoa, dating from the late 19th Century to 1915, has been preserved and is held in German archives. In this talk, George Lasry describes the process of identifying the encoding methods, of reconstructing diplomatic codebooks, and of recovering the super-encipherment applied to a German Navy codebook, so that the vast majority of the messages can now be read in clear. He also provides the historical context for the messages, which shed new light on the impact of the mobilisation and war declarations on the Genoa consulate, its role in gathering naval intelligence, and in assisting the Goeben and Breslau warships in their escape to the Dardanelles in August 1914.
January 9, 2021
Here is a list of past presentations at ICCH. The most recent presentation is at the top. Click on each listing to reveal more information below, including the speaker, as well as the presentation date and description. Presentation recordings are available separately, in the ICCH Portal.
To view upcoming ICCH presentations, click here.
Note: Effort has been made to ensure that the information on each presentation is accurate and up-to-date. To suggest a correction please contact the ICCH webmaster Patrick Hayes at info@cryptologichistory.org.
In World War I, the German diplomatic services and the Imperial Navy employed codebooks as the primary means for encoding confidential communications over telegraph and radio channels. The Entente cryptographic services were able to reconstruct most of those codebooks, to obtain copies of others, and to overcome various enhancements introduced by the Germans. A collection of diplomatic and naval attaché cryptograms from and to the German consulate in Genoa, dating from the late 19th Century to 1915, has been preserved and is held in German archives. In this talk, George Lasry describes the process of identifying the encoding methods, of reconstructing diplomatic codebooks, and of recovering the super-encipherment applied to a German Navy codebook, so that the vast majority of the messages can now be read in clear. He also provides the historical context for the messages, which shed new light on the impact of the mobilisation and war declarations on the Genoa consulate, its role in gathering naval intelligence, and in assisting the Goeben and Breslau warships in their escape to the Dardanelles in August 1914.
January 9, 2021
