Code-Cracking Colossus KOed in 46 Seconds!

Yesterday, I wrote about the World War II code-cracking engine named Colossus, which has been resurrected and is participating in a Cipher Challenge to decode new Lorenz-encrypted messages against all comers. Well, a German man living in Bonn named Joachim Schüth has beaten Colossus using software he wrote himself, in Ada! CNET News reports all here. Here’s more in a later Reuter’s story. It took 46 seconds for the Ada program to break the code! (Back in the late 1980s, I wrote articles on the Ada programming language for EDN including a hands-on article where I learned Ada. Sorry, the online EDN archives don’t go back that far.)