Seminar: The German Enigma Machine and WWII
All dates for this event occur in the past.
Speaker Jason Armstrong, of the National Security Agency, presents a brief history of cryptography, leading up to the use of the German enigma machine. He provides an overview and demonstration of the enigma machine as used by the German operator, as well as the methods that led to it being broken by the Allies, forever changing the course of World War II in Europe.
BACKGROUND:
In 1939, World War II broke out with the invasion and advancement of German forces across Europe. This was accomplished through a blitzkrieg, or "lightning war," and by securing communications across the German command structure. A primary tool used to encode messages across the German military was the Enigma machine. Although the machine was developed and patented in 1918, it made several advancements on its way to eventually being adopted by the German military and becoming a formidable capability that proved an impediment to the Allies being able to read German messages. The use of the Enigma machine set off a barrage of Allied intelligence activities to uncover its secrets leading to it eventually being broken, thus allowing the Allies to read German messages.
The story has since been honored through movies such as The Imitation Game, U-571 and Enigma.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Jason Armstrong is the Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) Security Education Academic Liaison (SEAL) to the Pennsylvania State University (also known as the SID SEAL to Penn State) and an Office Technical Leader within the Signals Intelligence Directorate at the National Security Agency.
Armstrong graduated from Penn State University in 1991 with a Bachelor of Science Degree, majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics. He received his Masters of Science Degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University in 1998 with a discipline in Artificial Intelligence. He has extensive experience in the signals intelligence (SIGINT) processing domain and has held several positions during his over 24 year career at NSA. His first position was held as Curriculum Manager and Head Instructor for the Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence curriculums (1991-1994) at the National Cryptologic School/Associate Directorate for Education and Training. He later served as Project Leader and Developer of Artificial Intelligence techniques in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and image processing technologies (1994-1997), and later designed and developed various Application Programming Interfaces (API) and processing services as Program Manager of the Application Processing Program (1997-2005).
In addition, Armstrong spent a one year tour (2012-2013) at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) as a visiting professor in Cybersecurity.
Additional Background:
Armstrong also served as an adjunct instructor at the Anne Arundel Community College (AACC), in Arnold, Maryland (1993-2008). He was responsible for teaching several courses in graphical user interface design, C and C++ programming, and software development.