Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/07/details-of-alan-turings-voice-encryption-system.html

Really interesting piece of cryptographic history:

In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers—nicknamed the “Bayley papers”—was auctioned in London for almost half a million U.S. dollars. The previously unknown cache contains many sheets in Turing’s own handwriting, telling of his top-secret “Delilah” engineering project from 1943 to 1945. Delilah was Turing’s portable voice-encryption system, named after the biblical deceiver of men. There is also material written by Bayley, often in the form of notes he took while Turing was speaking. It is thanks to Bayley that the papers survived: He kept them until he died in 2020, 66 years after Turing passed away.