German amateur cracks WWII mega-code in 46 seconds

By Luke Baker

LONDON (Reuters) - British computer experts acknowledged defeat on Friday after a German amateur radio enthusiast won a challenge to crack secret messages encoded by a World War Two cipher.

Joachim Schueth, from the German city of Bonn, managed to intercept a special radio transmission and decipher a super-complex code in less than two hours using software he wrote for the challenge.

Britain's Colossus computer, built in the 1940s to break secret German transmissions during the war and painstakingly rebuilt over the past 14 years, was still racing through its computations to come up with a solution.

Schueth's computer program actually managed to crack the hardest part of the challenge -- deciphering the code of a Lorenz SZ42 encryptor, which has approximately 16 million million million permutations -- in just 46 seconds.

"It's a brilliant piece of work, really really impressive," said Andrew Clark, director of Britain's National Museum of Computing, which designed the challenge and is overseeing the running of Colossus, based at Bletchley Park outside London.

"He's used a program that is highly optimized for this task and he's designed it very well.

"We're really pleased and very impressed. It highlights the strength of the international community working together."

Schueth was not immediately reachable for comment, but on his Web site he explained in a very low-key way how he had gone about defeating a machine that in its day was the most powerful calculator in the world and the forerunner of modern computing.