The Story of Mamba: Aligning Messages Against Recovered Additives.

A postwar report shows that during World War II, OP-20-GM, the research section of Naval Communications, planned and the Naval Computing Machine Laboratory engineered and produced at least 27 different codebreaking machines or attachments, and did developmental work on others. This is the story of one of those machines: Mamba. The documentation relating to Mamba is thorough enough that it is possible to track the development of Mamba from an idea based upon the garble-check properties built into the Japanese naval ciphers JN-25 and JN-11 through planning and engineering to a finished machine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]