Cool old technology - the Vula encryption system
Back in the 1980's, personal computers were in their infancy but some people were doing amazing things with them. This article was written by Tim Jenkin of the African National Congress which was the group leading the fight against Apartheid in South Africa.
From the
African National Congress website:
Talking To Vula
The Story of the Secret Underground Communications Network of Operation Vula
The Importance of Good Communications
In the mid-`eighties there was a great deal of soul-searching taking place in the ANC. While there had been some spectacular armed attacks against the apartheid regime, the underground struggle had not really taken off. There was very little to show for the years of struggle, only hundreds of activists in the enemy`s jails and the loss of tons of precious weaponry.
Discussion raged among comrades at all levels about why the armed struggle had achieved so little and why there was no real underground to speak of. True, mass resistance had reached unprecedented levels and much of this was attributed to the courageous work of ANC activists who had been infiltrated back into the country. Nonetheless, there was no real ANC presence inside the country and the ANC could not legitimately claim to be the leading force behind the mass struggles taking place.
The communications system - this is a long article and I am excerpting heavily:
It was always the same pattern: comrades would go back home feeling enthusiastic and begin by sending a series of messages. They soon came to realise that it was a futile activity as it took so much effort to say so very little and the responses, as few and far between as they were, contained little encouragement and advice. There were only instructions which usually lacked any connection with the reality they were experiencing.
Tim made the following changes:
I was determined to do something about this so set out to revamp the communications methods being used from London. The first to go were the awful book codes we had always used. In their place I substituted proper numerical ciphers. Next to go were the complicated invisible inks. In their place I substituted ultra-violet, invisible-ink, marker pens and a whole variety of concealment methods including microfilms, secret compartments and audio cassettes.
All of this made little difference though, as it was the manual encryption that still took the time. A short message of a few hundred characters would take all evening to encipher. I tried various schemes to streamline the process but made little headway because it remained a boring, manual task. There was no help from our leaders for they were not concerned with the methods of secret communications. They were only interested in the clear messages that came out of and went into the communications. How the messages were transferred was none of their business. That was the concern of the comms officers like me.
It was at this time, the early `eighties, that personal computers were becoming affordable. In them I saw our salvation. A computer, I read, was eminently suitable for boring, repetitive tasks - and that`s what we had on our hands. The purchase of our first computer led to a revolution in our communications that ultimately made possible operations such as Vula.
A bit more -- they had tried using Modems but the telephone lines were so bad as to render them unusable. They explore DTMF signaling -- you know this as the touch tone phone (Dual Tone Multiple Frequency):
Ronnie put together a little microphone device that - when held on the earpiece of the receiving telephone - could display whatever number was pressed at the sending end. Using touch-tone telephones or separate tone pads as used for telephone banking services two people could send each other coded messages over the telephone. This could be done from public telephones, thus ensuring the safety of the users.
To avoid having to key in the numbers while in a telephone booth the tones could be recorded on a tape recorder at home and then played into the telephone. Similarly, at the receiving end, the tones could be recorded on a tape recorder and then decoded later. Messages could even be sent to an answering machine and picked up from an answering machine if left as the outgoing message.
We gave a few of these devices, disguised as electronic calculators, to activists to take back to South Africa. They were not immensely successful as the coding still had to be done by hand and that remained the chief factor discouraging people from communicating.
The equipment was smuggled into South Africa around 1988 and was handling large volumes of traffic in 1989. The police did manage to arrest some people and get the codes but provisions for this were in place and they were only out for a day or two. Like the modern-day internet, it was designed to route around damaged nodes.
Very cool story of very courageous people freeing a nation. If you have the fifteen minutes, it is worth
reading the whole thing.
Posted by DaveH at December 27, 2013 10:46 AM