A collection of documents recently sold at auction for almost half a million dollars reveals Alan Turing’s top-secret voice-encryption project during World War II. The project, called Delilah, resulted in a compact, portable device for secure voice communication. Turing and his assistant Donald Bayley worked on Delilah at an ultrasecret intelligence site where they overcame formidable challenges to synchronize key generators. The device discreetly converted and encrypted speech signals before transmitting them for decryption. The groundbreaking project was abandoned after the war, but paved the way for Turing’s future work in electronic computing. This remarkable discovery sheds new light on Turing the engineer and his innovative contributions to cryptography.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/alan-turings-delilah