Talk:Fish (cryptography)

FISH vs Fish
My memory is that the BP term for the two machines was not all caps. If we've knit the all caps into the structure here, is there need for a dab or redirect? I suspect so. Comment? ww 19:04, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * The original BP documents I have seen use "Fish" (e.g. here) and "Tunny" (e.g. here, as well as throughout the Tunny document), butttttttt they also used "FISH" (e.g. here). I haven't yet found a reference to Sturgeon, but it's dollars to donuts they would have used "Sturgeon" too.
 * Various books which were either definitely or probably produced with the help of GCHQ personnel (e.g. Johnson, Secret War; Lewin Ultra Goes to War) also use "Fish". However, West, SIGINT Secrets uses FISH, but that may also be his personal device to keep all the code names clear. (BTW, for those who don't have this, it has a wonderful 5-page appendix of all the various code-names for various nets, from ALBATROSS to YELLOW, along with the service that used it, the German code name, what it was used for, and the date of the first break. Neat.)
 * I personally don't care whether we use "FOO" or "Foo", as long as we are consistent across a) articles, and b) across crypto-systems. Noel (talk) 14:28, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * (I've seen books (I think F. L. Bauer's Decrypted Secrets) use caps even for things like "ENIGMA"!) Thanks for doing some digging on the usage. I prefer "Fish" personally, but if there's not a dominant style, then perhaps we might choose the shortest name that we can as the article name; that is, if it's a choice between FISH and Fish (cryptography), then maybe we should go for the former? Outside of this article, if the usage is mixed in the literature, I would probably advocate consistency only within individual articles, and not across articles. &mdash; Matt Crypto  16:42, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * (No problem on the digging - I'm doing some other stuff in this area at the moment anyway, so a good chunk of my crypto library is spread out around me, making it fairly easy!) To the extent there's a preference (I wouldn't go anywhere near so far as to say "dominant"), it seems to be "Fish", so I would say you get your wish! Ironically, that BP document that used "FISH" uses "Fish" on the very next page. Go figure! So there's clearly no rigidly-adhered-to system.
 * So if you would prefer "Fish (cryptography) that's fine with me - unless you think minimizing length should outweigh all else, and would rather go for "FISH". Length doesn't bother me, I'm just as happy with "FISH" as with "Fish (cryptography)".
 * Second, why wouldn't we want to standardize usage? (Not that I'm advocating editing articles just for the heck of it to swap the capping, but if you're working on something anyway...) Also, when I said "across crypo-systems" above, I just meant among groups like Fish, Tunny, Herring (a later Tunny keysystem on the Rome-Tunix link), etc, I didn't mean globally across all cryposystems. It just looks really, well, ugly to look at FISH (cryptography) and see "Tunny" and "STURGEON" next to each other.
 * PS: I'm in the process of adding a Fish (disambiguation) page, and will point it here, so people will be able to find this page easily. Noel (talk) 18:35, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Fish (cryptography) sounds good to me too, and I certainly agree that mixing things like Tunny and STURGEON is very ugly! By the way, if you've got your crypto books out, and if you've got the time/inclination, would you be interested in collaboratvely working one of these articles up to Featured Article quality? I've been doing a bit of reading on Tunny / Colossus over the past week or two. &mdash; Matt Crypto 15:59, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Actually, as I look at what's happening here, I suggest we split this page up because as we add material on both, it'll get ugly with Fish (which I'll use in this note for the WWII one) and FISH (the Fibonacci one on the same page).
 * I was going to say that then we'd need a disambig, but I just realized we can do that on Fish (disambiguation) ; as long as there are only two cryptographic fish, we can link the two crypto fish pages back and forth at their headers; thereafter the link would have to be back to Fish (disambiguation).
 * The only thing remaining is to decide what to call the pages. I reckon we can use Fish (cryptography) and FISH (cipher), which I think works nicely, although FISH (cryptography) for the second one is fine too. I think Fish (cipher) is not appropriate for a title if we use it to describe all the teleprinter ciphers (although I'm not positive this corresponds to actual BP usage (see the BP dictionary entry for Fish here - I need to check this some more).
 * As to the featured article, yes, but I'd like to do a dump of all the stuff I've been accumulating in my brain over the last couple of days to add first! :-) Noel (talk) 17:38, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Sounds a good scheme for the naming. &mdash; Matt Crypto 18:48, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * OK, done. Cross-linked the two pages, looked all pages that linked to this to weed out the ones to the modern FISH.
 * Should I set FISH (cryptography) to point to Fish (disambiguation) (after I have changed all pages that refer to it, of course), as it really is a bit ambiguous? I suppose not, as it is referred to as FISH in a number of documents/books. What about Fish (cipher) - send that one to the new one?
 * More stuff coming soon on this Fish. Noel (talk) 23:28, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The General Report on Tunny uses Fish. Wikipedia Manual of style says one should avoid writing in all capitals except for acronyms or initialisms. FISH is neither, so I suggest that it should be eliminated.TedColes (talk) 06:29, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Russian Fish
I actually have seen reference to something called "Russian Fish" (although that was almost certainly not its proper name), in Thomas Parrish The Ultra Americans, which has part of a chapter on it (pp. 282-284). It describes (and has photos of) some gear the Germans built to intercept and decode "the Soviet equivalent of the German Fish" - implying that it was teleprinter traffic, but not saying so explicitly. It does say it used 9 separate radio channels (which would seem to confirm it is teleprinter - although it might have been voice, a la X-system).

I've never seen anything else about this (not too surprising - they would have kept such breakins to Soviet traffic very quiet). Perhaps there's some family relationship to the gear that was built to decode signals intercepted in the Berlin tunnel (but that's a total guess). Noel (talk) 05:00, 11 May 2005 (UTC)


 * After a query about it, I have scanned/OCRd the relevant pages, and put them online here for people to check out.
 * Bamford, Body of Secrets, contains very similar text (in Chapter 2), but that seems to be because it draws on the same source as Parrish - Whitaker's diary. Parrish also did an interview with Whitaker. Noel (talk) 21:43, 16 February 2011 (UTC)


 * It's clear to me that "Russian Fish" is German hardware for tapping Soviet traffic, and has nothing to do with the German "Fish" cryptographic system -- thus the Fish page should not use the "Russian Fish" photo. Karl gregory jones (talk) 16:21, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

Fish wireless links
Paul Gannon is clear that the name was given by the Bletchley Park cryptanalysts to the links in the German Non-Morse wirelesss networks. Later, as a shorthand, Tunny was used for the Lorenz SZ40/42 and Sturgeon for the Siemens and Halske T52 machine. TedColes (talk) 13:46, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Sturgeon of Low Value ?
I wonder if the low value of Sturgeon was because it mostly or always used landlines which for England must have been hard to tap into. Since Sweden had those cables running through it's own country criss crossing to both Norway and Finland from Germany there must have been better material available, especially since Sweden's problem was more of a Diplomatic nature as she wasn't in the war and attempted to remain in that state. Sweden for instance got the readiness reports of forces in norway to the last bomb as well as well as advanced warning of Operation Barbarossa including the Date.

Since it was deemed of little use is there a case given for this somewhere, i suspect it was for the above reasons. 85.228.59.14 (talk) 15:39, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

List of senior executives and cryptographers on FISH
I added Max Newman to this list as he and his department (the Newmanry) made a very major contribution to breaking Fish messages with the Robinsons and Colossi. However, this addition has been reversed by 92.8.21.232 why? TedColes (talk) 13:22, 7 October 2008 (UTC)


 * The recent edit of the heading of this section produces an ambiguity, as the list might be thought to cover all senior staff at Bletchley Park. We do, however, need links to the Testery and Newmanry articles. Given that we have lists of relevant people in those two articles, I suggest that it would be sensible to delete this section. What do others think?--TedColes (talk) 17:52, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Is W. T. Tutte included in this article?
Maybe I am still half asleep but I don't see any mention of Bill Tutte's major contribution.

Also see Cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, Tutte graph

Broadly speaking, what the eccentric mathematical genius Alan Turing did for Enigma, Bill Tutte did for cracking the Lorenz cipher, codenamed "Fish" by the British. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/may/10/guardianobituaries.obituaries Peter K Burian (talk) 13:18, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
 * No, Tutte is only mentioned in one citation. But this article should not duplicate Cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher which details his achievement. --TedColes (talk) 15:59, 12 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Hmmm... I agree we should not duplicate a lot of content but not to mention W.T. Tutte and John Tiltman seems strange. I have added them to the list; this is the very least this article deserves, especially re: Tutte.

But, in an extraordinary piece of analysis, John Tiltman, possibly the greatest British codebreaker ever, and Bill Tutte, a recently recruited chemistry and maths graduate, managed to work out the internal mechanisms. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/11231608/Breaking-the-Enigma-code-was-the-easiest-part-of-the-Nazi-puzzle.html
 * Peter K Burian (talk) 16:39, 12 May 2017 (UTC)