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Layer ablation console

The 1942 code-talker stack was three layers deep. Switch them off one at a time and watch what an adversary actually recovers — the point is to find out which layer was load-bearing, not to build a secure channel.

Everything below this card is a live channel. The guided lab moves one switch at a time; the crate re-runs a real two-party handshake and two real encrypted messages, and every panel underneath — the verdict, the adversary matrix, the bytes on the wire — is the result of that run. Nothing here is a mock-up, so if you change a switch yourself the numbers change with it. Predict before you apply. That is the step the lab is built around.

Guided lab

    Transmission

    Sent on the same channel. The and the two-time pad are both claims about consecutive messages, so one is not enough to show either.

    Layers

    The 1942 stack
    Absent in 1942
    Injected fault

    The adversary

    What the adversary recovers

    — —

    Which adversary

    A1–A5, computed for this configuration

    “Channel holding” is never universal. It holds against a named adversary, for a named asset — A4 is a adversary and needs no access today. Definitions are in THREAT_MODEL.md.

    What leaks regardless

    true in every configuration above

    is what stays true about a message when its contents do not. No switch on this page moves any of it.

    On the wire

    The intended recipient

    Handshake

    Both sides hash every handshake message into a , which is signed and then bound into every frame as . Verifying that signature against a key known in advance is .

    Inspect internals — transcript hash, root key, per-frame message keys

    Terms

    one sentence each

    Dotted terms elsewhere on the page open the same definition on hover or keyboard focus.

    Why this stack, and whose it was

    The Navajo code was a Type One Code: Navajo words stood for English letters homophonically — A could be sent as the word for ant, apple or axe — layered over a codebook of several hundred military terms. It was not "speaking Navajo."

    Joe Kieyoomia, a Navajo speaker held as a prisoner of war, was forced to listen to intercepted transmissions. He recognised his own language and could not read a word of it, because he did not have the codebook. He was tortured in the course of it. Popular retellings credit the rarity of the language; the record credits the codebook. That is the switch in the left rail, and it is the one that changes nothing.

    By modern standards the scheme is a homophonic substitution over a rare language. Contemporary analyses hold that a team pairing a native speaker with trained cryptanalysts would likely have broken it. The Japanese had the speaker and never assembled the team — an operational failure on their side, not cryptographic strength on the Allied side.