A US Navy WWII Encryption Device

[Puster Bill]

Originally Posted by CDR Resser

Kim Ronhof over at subsowespac.com, and the Pacific Thunder site built an electronic cipher program for communications within the Pacific Thunder Campaign. He might have some of the information that you are looking for. Sorry, I don't know his email address.

Respectfully Submitted;
CDR Resser

Thanks. I took a look at what they had at subsowespac.org, and it appears to be an electronic version of the SIGABA/CSP-888/889 cipher machine. The CSP-888/889 was a rotor machine, essentially a more complicated version of the German Enigma.

If I were going to use a simulation of a CSP-888/889, I'd probably use the one found at Frode Weierud's 'CryptoCellar':
http://cryptocellar.org/simula/sigaba/

The Navy also used the M-209, which they designated as CSP-1500. Dirk Rijmenants (of Enigma Simulator fame) has a nifty M-209 simulator here:
http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/m209sim.htm

The CSP-1500 was actually the replacement for the CSP-488 that I implemented here. It was somewhat more secure, but could still be broken if enough plaintext could be had, or if two or more messages had keys that overlapped. Apparently, it was used to communicate with units that didn't have the (presumably more secure) CSP-845 strip cipher.

I have neither the time, the skills, nor the money to build a SIGABA or an M-209, though. Nor do I have the money to buy them (M-209's occasionally come up for sale). I do have the time and patience to make strip ciphers, though.

By the way, I re-did the CSP-488 Mk II into a vertical orientation, and I used my wife's paper cutter to cut out the strips, which made it *SO* much easier. I'll post a pic when I get a chance. I now have an EXCEL file for the strips, and a Word document for the strip holder.