Spy Wars: I have space, but I choose to work alone

Ma Liang casually flipped through any piece of intelligence that could be sold at a sky-high price on the intelligence black market, as if he was reading gossip news.

"Fortunately, we are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council who are always prepared for a nuclear war. If we switch to foreign advanced equipment, we will probably be at a loss."

Looking at the various top-secret information categorized in the computer, Ma Liang felt a little emotional.

Nowadays, various military communications generally use satellites or optical cable communications. Basically, no military uses primitive and inefficient telegraphs.

However, satellites and communication optical cables will be destroyed first in a nuclear war. Instead, the relatively primitive radio telegraph communication will be able to maintain long-distance communications after a nuclear war.

This is especially true for China, which is constantly fighting a world war. The spy communication equipment in space is also an advanced communication method of satellite plus the Internet.

But without exception, they were all forced to install primitive radio transmitters so that they could continue to function in a nuclear war.

This tactical thinking was instilled in all of the Celestial Empire's military equipment and training.

At first, Ma Liang felt that this set was a bit useless, and it was difficult to reduce the size of the equipment. The brick-like agent walkie-talkie has now become Ma Liang's biggest weapon.

Since the advent of radio, cryptography has entered a new era.

The advantages of radio communication are extremely obvious. As long as there is a radio transceiver, radio communication can be carried out almost anytime and anywhere, except for the influence of extreme weather and terrain.

And no matter how far the distance is, the receiver can receive it at the first time.

However, radio communication also has an inherent flaw: openness.

Radio signals are transmitted throughout the earth's space and can be received by anyone with a receiving device.

In order to maintain confidentiality, armies of various countries made extensive use of radio encrypted communications during World War II, and various novel encryption techniques emerged one after another.

There are dozens of top-secret codes such as the Red Code, Purple Code, Light Code, Enigma Machine, Navajo Code, etc.

To decipher any one of them, it would require countless geniuses and the death of countless brain cells to complete it.

However, radio communication has a disadvantage. It is not point-to-point communication, but point-to-face communication.

To give a simple example, in radio communication, A wants to contact B who is far away, and their communication process is roughly like this.

A held a loud speaker and shouted in Mandarin: Xiao B, Xiao B, please reply if you hear me.

If B does not turn on his phone, communication will be impossible, so it is usually necessary to agree on a communication time in advance.

If B's radio is turned on at this time, when B hears someone calling him, he also shouts in Mandarin through a loudspeaker: Xiao A, Xiao A, I am Lao B, I got it.

After the two parties established contact, in order to prevent others from hearing their secrets, Xiao B and Xiao A no longer spoke in Mandarin that everyone could understand, but instead used their hometown dialects to communicate.

"Have you eaten yet?"

"When can you come out and have a drink?"

"I have time to spare."

·············

The dialect they spoke was called a code on the radio. During the entire communication process, anyone who kept the radio turned on could hear their conversation.

People who are curious about what they are saying will record what they say. When there are enough samples, a large amount of manpower and material resources will be organized to statistically analyze the common points and understand what they are saying.

This process is called decryption.

This classical cryptographic system required a huge amount of work to decipher in the 30s, as it could only be deciphered manually.

All countries know that if this kind of code system is used for a long time, there is a risk that the rules will be discovered and deciphered. Take the example of the spy radio stations that were common during World War II.

A Japanese spy radio station installed in the mountain city, their mission is to report the weather in the mountain city to the Japanese Army Air Force at the distant airport.

So that bombers can be dispatched in clear weather without fog or rain and with high visibility, and can bomb targets more accurately.

The content of the telegram it sent was basically: today is sunny and suitable for bombing, today is foggy and not suitable for bombing, mixed with a lot of similar weather names.

After a while, the code breakers will be able to crack the codes representing various weather words based on the weather in the mountain city.

For example, if a set of passwords that appear repeatedly for sunny days is 1123, then 1123 means sunny.

And so on, just like playing a crossword puzzle, and then deciphering the entire code bit by bit.

For this reason, military codes of various countries during World War II were changed regularly, even if there were no signs of enemy cracking.

In this case, after you have spent a lot of time and energy to figure out the enemy's password, the enemy often changes to a new password.

A lot of intelligence is time-sensitive and cannot be deciphered within the effective time. Even if it is deciphered later, it will be of little use.

This classical code that can drive people crazy or even kill them is nothing but a younger brother, and an even weaker one at that, in front of modern computers.

Even the Hans Enigma machine, which theoretically could solve a new code every day, could not last more than an hour in front of a modern computer.

In a word, as long as there are enough samples, there is no classical code that cannot be deciphered by ordinary computers today.

This is the limitation of classical cryptography, no matter how complex and sophisticated its encryption techniques are.

Even in terms of computing power, any smartphone today can easily crack these classical codes from the World War II era; it’s just a matter of time.

Even the amount of calculations that took the navigation computer used by Apollo 11 to land on the moon 618 days to complete can be completed in just one second on a modern mobile phone.

Not to mention cracking the classic codes of some pure text games.

In the past half month, the program designed by Ma Liang automatically collected enough samples. As early as a few days ago, a large number of encrypted telegrams were available for Ma Liang to review.

However, truly top-secret telegrams cannot be easily cracked, such as codes with too few samples or those that use unpopular code words.

For example, during the Cold War, the United States cracked a telegram from China.

"Ms. Qiu has already put on her clothes and is braiding her hair."

Everyone knows these words individually, but when put together, they form another set of top-secret codes. The real meaning is:

The nuclear bomb has been assembled and the detonator is being inserted.

When the samples are too small, even a supercomputer cannot decipher these deeply encrypted codes.

Ma Liang chose from the codes of various countries and finally chose the radio code used by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

This set of codes was designed independently by Japan with the efforts of the entire country and is said to be impossible to decipher, known as the Purple Code.

As a professional agent, Ma Liang might not be very clear about the history of other fields. For example, Ma Liang knew nothing about the obscure knowledge such as voltage during the Republic of China period.