Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Japanese naval codes
Summary
The vulnerability of Japanese naval codes and ciphers was crucial to the conduct of World War II, and had an important influence on foreign relations between Japan and the west in the years leading up to the war as well. Every Japanese code was eventually broken, and the intelligence gathered made possible such operations as the victorious American ambush of the Japanese Navy at Midway in 1942 (by breaking code JN-25b) and the shooting down of Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto a year later in Operation Vengeance.
The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) used many codes and ciphers. All of these cryptosystems were known differently by different organizations; the names listed below are those given by Western cryptanalytic operations.
The Red Book code was an IJN code book system used in World War I and after. It was called "Red Book" because the American photographs made of it were bound in red covers. It should not be confused with the RED cipher used by the diplomatic corps.
This code consisted of two books. The first contained the code itself; the second contained an additive cipher which was applied to the codes before transmission, with the starting point for the latter being embedded in the transmitted message. A copy of the code book was obtained in a "black bag" operation on the luggage of a Japanese naval attaché in 1923; after three years of work Agnes Driscoll was able to break the additive portion of the code.
Knowledge of the Red Book code helped crack the similarly constructed Blue Book code.
A cipher machine developed for Japanese naval attaché ciphers, similar to JADE. It was not used extensively, but Vice Admiral Katsuo Abe, a Japanese representative to the Axis Tripartite Military Commission, passed considerable information about German deployments in CORAL, intelligence "essential for Allied military decision making in the European Theater."
A cipher machine used by the Imperial Japanese Navy from late 1942 to 1944 and similar to CORAL; see JADE (cypher machine).
A succession of codes used to communicate between Japanese naval installations.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.