The HX-63 was an advanced

rotor machine In cryptography, a rotor machine is an electro-mechanical stream cipher device used for encrypting and decrypting messages. Rotor machines were the cryptographic state-of-the-art for much of the 20th century; they were in widespread use in the 19 ...

Crypto AG Crypto AG was a Swiss company specialising in communications and information security founded by Boris Hagelin in 1952. The company was secretly purchased for US $5.75 million and jointly owned by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) a ...

founder

Boris Hagelin Boris Caesar Wilhelm Hagelin (2 July 1892 – 7 September 1983) was a Swedish businessman and inventor of encryption machines. Biography Born of Swedish parents in Adshikent, Russian Empire, Hagelin attended Lundsberg boarding school and late ...

. Development of the device started in 1952 and lasted a decade. The machine had nine rotors, each with 41 contacts. There were 26 keyboard inputs and outputs, leaving 15 wires to "loop back" through the rotors via a different path. Moreover, each rotor wire could be selected from one of two paths. The movement of the rotors was irregular and controlled by switches. There were two plugboards with the machine; one to scramble the input, and one for the loop-back wires. The machine also used a technique called reinjection (also called reentry), which increased its security exponentially. The machine could be set up in around 10⁶⁰⁰ different configurations.

William Friedman William Frederick Friedman (September 24, 1891 – November 12, 1969) was a US Army cryptographer who ran the research division of the Army's Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) in the 1930s, and parts of its follow-on services into the 1950s. In ...

, the first chief cryptologist of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), was alarmed when he read Hagelin's patent on the machine. Friedman realized that the machine was more secure than the NSA's

KL-7 The TSEC/KL-7, also known as Adonis was an off-line non-reciprocal rotor encryption machine.

and unbreakable. Friedman and Hagelin were good friends from

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, and Friedman called on Hagelin to terminate the program, which CryptoAG did. Only twelve of these machines were manufactured, and it was adopted by only one department of the

French Government The Government of France ( French: ''Gouvernement français''), officially the Government of the French Republic (''Gouvernement de la République française'' ), exercises executive power in France. It is composed of the Prime Minister, who ...

(about 1960).

References

External links

Jerry Proc's pages
— photographs and a brief description

See also

References

External links

Further reading