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Figur 2: The Hagelin M-209
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Figur 3: BC-38
The Hagelin M-209 cipher machine
the first half of the 1960s. The initial price was $64. Today collectors buy it for up to several thousand US dollars.
Hagelin earned millions of dollars in royalties, and became the first and possible only cryptology millionaire.
The M-209 was first used during the invasion of Africa in November 1942, and did not only see the battlefields of WW2, it was the standard ciphering machine for tactical use in the US
Army’s through the Korean War, which ended in 1954.
Since the M-209 was meant to be used by soldiers in the field, its size and rugged construction was very important, but made it unpractical for use in Command
Control centers. Hagelin therefore developed the BC-38, which was an electromechanical version of the fully mechanical M-209. This machine were fitted with
a full QWERTY keyboard which made it more practical for this use. Like the M-209, the BC-38 also
have a pure mechanical enciphering/deciphering process. The only electric parts is a motor and it’s driving circuit. The motor is only used for driving the mechanical encipher/decipher method. It can also be used without electricity, by driving the encipher/decipher process by a handle on the right side, much like on the M-209.
Near the end of WW2, even the Germans showed interest in Hagelin’s BC machine to replace the Engima, since it had been broken by the British at Bletchley Park. Since Sweden was neutral they had no problems with selling to both sides. Germany even started to produce Hagelin machines under license, and kept doing so into the 1950’s. There were also licensed production in France.
In the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945, Hagelin came with a slightly modified version of the M-209, the C-446. At first sight there were not many changes, but it had two printers, one for clear text and one for cipher text, and two locks, one for the operator and one for the offices. But the most interesting part is that the C-446 also came with a version without the pin-wheels. Instead it had a reader for one-time pad paper tape, which with truly random keys generated a cipher which Claude Shannon in his world famous 1949 paper “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems” termed “perfect secrecy”. Perfect secrecy means that the cipher gives no additional information about the plaintext, and is unbreakable. The most famous one-time pad
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Figur 4: CX-52
The Hagelin M-209 cipher machine
ciphering machine is the Norwegian ETCRRM (Electronic Teleprinter Cryptographic Regenerative Repeater Mixer) using the Vernam principle, produced by Standard Telefon og Kabelfabrik in the 1950s, and used on the Washington – Moscow hotline during the Cold War.
After WW2 there were even more need for ciphering equipment, and Hagelin made
improvements on his M-209 design, and produced machines with even more complex algorithms. The CX-52 machines developed in 1952, used six changeable wheels, which was picked from a set of twelve. The numbers of letters on the wheels were 25, 26, 29, 31, 34, 37, 38, 41, 42, 43, 46 and 47. Five of the wheels had irregular stepping, which made the cipher algorithm
even more secure. The machine also had five more bars in the cage than the M-209, in a total of 32 bars. The extra five bars controlled the irregular stepping of the pin-wheels. Using the wheels with twice the numbers of letters than the M-209 wheels, and a special lug configuration in the cage, made the machine compatible with the M-209, BC-38 and C-446.
A bad design in the irregular pin-wheels stepping made the last of the six wheel move in a way that it did not contribute very much to the security of the machine. This was fixed in a new version called the CX-52. The CX-52 came in many different versions including one with a one-time pad paper tape reader instead of the pin-wheels, and one with Arabic letters.
The CX-52 were Hagelin’s most successful mechanical cipher machine, both commercially and technically. It was sold to over 50 countries, and in use even after Hagelin started to produce fully electronic machines in the 1960s. The CX-52 was used as backup machines during the cold war into the 1980s, and by some countries all the way into the 1990s.
In 1992, it came into the light that the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1957, only five years after they were formed, made a deal with Hagelin’s company, Crypto AG, to place a backdoor in, among other cipher machines, the CX-52. This backdoor made the NSA able to easily decrypt messages sent by the Iranian Isalmic regime, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi, Ferdinand Marcos, Idi Amin, and even the Vatican. The backdoor access was also shared with the British intelligence service Government Communications Headquarters (GHCQ). After this it was widely accepted that this machine was not more used [OSVDB]. In September 2013 there was a huge media coverage in connection with the Edward Snowden leakage, that the NSA had backdoors into communication and cryptology equipment. The press wrote about this as it was
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The Hagelin M-209 cipher machine
something new, but for over 20 years, it has been known that NSA and GHCQ had a backdoor into the Hagelin CX-52 machine for 35 years.
If it hadn’t been for the backdoor, the CX-52 would still be relative secure to use. Even though it is based on principles from the 1920s, the CX-52 is very hard to break, even today with the help of computers.
The CX-52 was the last of Hagelins mechanical pin-wheel cipher machines, but Hagelin and his company, Crypto AG, continued to produce electronic cipher machines, and communication equipment. Today Crypto AG is still one of the biggest companies in the world when it comes to secure communication.
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