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PTT Neher Philips
Professor, scientist and inventor
Prof. Dr. Ir. Roelof Maarten Marie Oberman
(Leiden, 12 Juni 1910 – Wageningen 19 March 1989) (age 78)
was a Dutch academic who worked as a developer for the
Dr. Neher Laboratory in
Leidschendam (Netherlands) – at the time the prestigious research department
of the Dutch state-owned telecom monopolist PTT – and later as a
professor at the Delft University of Technology. 1
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After graduating twice from the Delft University of Technology,
Oberman began working for the Dutch state-owned telecom monopolist PTT
in 1935, where he became responsible for the development of the telegraphy
network (telex).
In 1946 he made the move to the prestigious
Dr. Neher Laboratory of the
PTT in Leidschendam (Netherlands) — at the time regarded the state laboratory
of The Netherlands.
In his capacity as senior developer at the Lab, he developed the first
Dutch post-war One-Time Tape
(OTT) cipher machine (a relay-based mixer
known as Colex) at the request of the
Dutch Government.
Colex evolved into
Ecolex I (Mark 1 and Mark 2),
and Ecolex II,
all of which were eventually taken over and produced in quantity for the
Dutch Foreign Ministry, the Department of Defense and NATO, by
Philips Usfa in Eindhoven.
It marked the start of Philips as a worldwide crypto-player.
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In 1949, at the official commissioning of the
Colex cipher machine between
five embassies and the Dutch Foreign Office in The Hague,
Oberman was decorated
Officier in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau
(Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau) by Dutch Prime Minister
Willem Drees.
Apart from cipher machines, Oberman also developed an allotment machine for
the Dutch State Lottery (Staatsloterij), which was a spin-off from the
Erolet key tape generator
that he had developed for the Colex and
Ecolex cipher machines.
In 1947, whilst working at PTT, Oberman became a teaching
assignment at the Delft University of Technology, where in 1949
he became an extaordinary professor.
In 1958, he left the Dr. Neher Lab of the PTT
to become full time Professor
at Delft University, where he lectured switching technology
– at the time the building blocks of telephone switches and
cipher machines –
until his retirement in 1980.
During his lifetime, Oberman filed more than 90 patents, most of which were
registered in multiple countries, including Germany, the UK and the USA.
Many of his inventions involved (telephone)
switching systems, for which the patents were filed on behalf of the Dutch
State or the PTT.
Philips Usfa
filed 9 patents in which Oberman and Snijders are listed as the inventors.
➤ Full biography
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At the time known as Technische Hogeschool Delft, abbreviated TH Delft.
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Related subjects on this website
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The following products were (co)developed by R.M.M. Oberman:
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Book about Dutch state secrets
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In 2022, Oberman's son Maarten released a book about the history of
cipher machines in The Netherlands after WWII, from 1945 to 1970,
in which his father played a key role. The book is based on Oberman's
personal archive, along with declassified material from the
Dutch General Intelligence Service AIVD
and documents from the Dutch National Archives.
The hard-cover book contains 260 full-colour pages and is written in
the Dutch language.
➤ More information
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Oberman graduated in 1932 as Mechanical Engineer (Ir.) at the Technical
University of Delft (Netherlands). As there wasn't much work at the time,
he was given the opportunity to stay on, as a result of which he
graduated again in 1935 as Electronics Engineer (Ir.).
After his graduation, he found a job as Telegraph Engineer at the
PTT district of Den Bosch (Netherlands). A year later, in 1936, he became
chief of the technical service department of the PTT's Telegraph
Office in Rotterdam.
In August 1940 he was transferred to the PTT headquarters in The Hague,
where he became responsible for the Telegraphy Department.
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After the war, in 1946, Oberman became head of the equipment department
at the Dr. Neher Laboratory of the PTT.
In 1947, he graduated cum laude
at Delft University, and became Doctor of Technical Sciences,
with his dissertation The Bridge Marker Key Automatic Switching System.
In May 1947 he was given a teaching assignment at Delft University,
and in 1949 became extraordinary Professor with a chair in Switching Technology.
In 1958 he became a full time
Professor in Switching Technology — the technology behind information
processing systems, telegraphy,
telephone switches and also behind
cipher machines.
Until that time (1958) he had worked at the PTT was well as at
Delft University. In 1980 he retired at the age of 70.
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During and also due to WWII it had become clear that
message communication systems were prone to
malicious interception, also known as co-reading or eavesdropping,
even if they were cryptographically protected.
This happened with the Enigma cipher machine, but also
to the Dutch WWII Intelligence Bureau (BI),
which suffered great losses because
its messages had been read by the enemy.
Immediately after the war, in 1946, the Dutch Government therefore
asked the PTT whether it
was possible to develop a secure telegraph system, that would
be immune to cryptanalytic attacks. They did not want
to buy such systems from foreign manufacturers, as they were afraid
that they might have hidden weaknesses or, worse, a
deliberately built-in
backdoor.
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The question finally landed on Oberman's desk in 1946/47,
as he was responsible for telegraphy matters within the PTT.
This led to the development of the Colex machine
— Codetelex — which, after two trial versions, met
the requirement of all parties involved.
Colex was a One-Time Tape cipher machine –
a practical implementation of the unbreakable
One-Time Pad (OTP) for use in telegraphy
communications –
and consisted of two parts: a mixer and a key generator.
When the latter meets the requirements of true randomness,
the system can be proven mathematically to be (forever)
unbreakable. The first implementation was completely relay-based,
due to the post-war lack of electronic components,
and was capable of encrypting just 3 characters per second.
The disadvantage of One-Time Tape
is the problem of key distribution.
Based on the Vernam Cipher,
the key has to be at least as long as the message, and can only be
used once, to prevent successful cryptanalytic attacks.
Furthermore, it cannot be used by multiple parties
and must be destroyed after use.
A stringent procedure is required
for generating and distributing the key tapes,
but it was (and still is) the only way to technically ensure
that State Secrets are kept secret.
The mixing part of the Colex (i.e. the mixer)
was constructed with
approx. 100 electromechanical relays that mix each letter of the
plaintext with a character from the key tape, using an operation that
was carried out with a mix and unmix feature. Several years later
this became known as the exlusive-OR operation (XOR),
also known as modulo-2 addition.
If both parties have the same key tape and use it from the same
starting position onwards (i.e. synchronised), the recipient has to
perform the same XOR operation in order to reveal the plaintext again.
One of the critical parts of the system is the key generator,
which Oberman had named Roulette. Facing the lack of electronic parts
immediately after the war,
he composed a creative solution to obtain and control randomness of the
key production in the Colex system.
It comprises a 400 kHz oscillator of which
the output is divided by 2 in five stages. Each stage produces one of the
five bits of the
ITA2 telegraph alphabet (Baudot),
whilst a relay is used to sample the output at ~225 ms intervals.
The uncertainty of the movement of the electromechanical relay is used
as the source of randomness (noise).
To check whether the noise was evenly distributed,
a set of five electromechanical counters were connected to the machine, allowing
the user to check whether each of the five output bits
appeared on the key tape an (approximate) equal number of times.
The Colex
was built by a small team under Oberman, and was put into
service in on 5 April 1949 by Dutch Prime Minister Willem Drees. It was used
for communication between the Foreign Office and the embassies in
London (UK), Paris (France), Washington (USA) and Jakarta (Indonesia).
➤ More about Colex
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Colex was succeeded by
Ecolex — Electronic Codetelex —
in which the electromechanical relays were replaced by thermionic valves
(vacuum tubes). This system was later renamed
Ecolex I, and was succeeded
around 1955 by Ecolex II,
in which the valves were replaced by transistors.
In the same vein, the Roulette key generator was succeeded by
Erolet, short for
Electronic Roulette.
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During the development of Colex
and Ecolex,
Oberman was a member of several
commissions, including Crypto Apparatuur Commissie (CAC)
– the crypto equipment commission – and Code Coördinatie Bureau,
the Dutch Cipher Authority.
As Oberman's employer — PTT — was a service provider and not
an equipment manufacturer, the production of cipher machines was not
regarded as core business, as a result of which in 1956
the production of the Ecolex machines was transferred to
Philips Usfa in Eindhoven (Netherlands),
who also took over development.
In 1958, Oberman left the PTT to become full time Professor
at Delft University. His major subject was switching technology (logic),
of which cryptography increasingly became part, especially when in the 1960s
cipher machines became based on electronic shift registers.
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In 1963 Philips released the
Ecolex IV,
but the operating principle had remained unchanged.
Typical customers at the time were the Foreign Office, the Department of
Defense, NATO
and several Danish and German organisations,
but the PTT had gradually lost interest in the matter.
Oberman retired from Delft University in 1980 at the age of 70,
and passed away on 19 March 1989 aged 78.
Of his aprox. 90 patents, about 25% is related to cryptography.
A more elaborate work on the Dutch history of cryptographic equipment
and its organisation in the post-war era (1945-1970), is the book
Staatsgeheim (State Secret) written in 2022 by Oberman's son Maarten.
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- Digital Circuits for Binary Arithmetic
- Counting and Counters
ISBN 0-333-30512-4. 1981
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© Crypto Museum. Created: Saturday 10 August 2019. Last changed: Tuesday, 18 April 2023 - 08:06 CET.
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![Quote from the first page of Oberman's book Counting and Counters [II]](svg/counting0.svg)