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Crack a "Numbers" Station
Posted by Hemos on Sat 27 May 01:35PM
from the cool-insight dept.
boss soul writes: "On Friday, NPR did an excellent story on those infamous 'Numbers Stations' that broadcast on shortwave radio. Since the 1950s, these stations have been broadcasting nothing but an unidentified human voice reading a string of numbers. Though most people believe that these broadcasts are used by intelligence agencies to communicate with their agents abroad, there has never been any way to confirm this ... until now! The makers of "The Conet Project" (a four-CD set of numbers-station recordings) have thrown down the proverbial gauntlet and announced a series of "cryptographic challenges" -- the object of which is to crack an actual numbers station broadcast. Dust off your Crypto caps, everyone -- I want to see a slashdotter win this one! "

Crack a "Numbers" Station
Posted by Hemos on Sat 27 May 01:35PM
from the cool-insight dept.
boss soul writes: "On Friday, NPR did an excellent story on those infamous 'Numbers Stations' that broadcast on shortwave radio. Since the 1950s, these stations have been broadcasting nothing but an unidentified human voice reading a string of numbers. Though most people believe that these broadcasts are used by intelligence agencies to communicate with their agents abroad, there has never been any way to confirm this ... until now! The makers of "The Conet Project" (a four-CD set of numbers-station recordings) have thrown down the proverbial gauntlet and announced a series of "cryptographic challenges" -- the object of which is to crack an actual numbers station broadcast. Dust off your Crypto caps, everyone -- I want to see a slashdotter win this one! "

An excerpt from NPR's Lost & Found Sound:
"Eventually, if listeners dig around [the shortwave spectrum] long enough, they'll tune across voices reciting endless strings of numbers. These broadcasts have been heard for at least 40 years. The signals are powerful, but they contain no information about location of the transmitter or the intended audience. Most listeners linger for a short time, then tune away, utterly baffled."

When I discovered these myself, I found them bizarre, chilling- and intriguing. In order to get some background, I ordered a 4-CD set from Irdial recordings in the UK called The Conet Project... highly reccomended.

What is perhaps the most surprising is that the number of numbers stations boradcasting on the shortwave band are only increasing- variously attributed to the increasing sophistication of organized crime, drug cartels, terrorist/separatist organizations and an increasingly fractious global intelligence community.

Do follow the links above if this intrigues you in the slightest- and just try going back to your insular world-view afterwards; "the enemy" is out there, and he's hiding right out in the open.

Basically, there's a reason we like symmetric-key algorithms, and it's mostly to do with usability. If an encryption system is such a pain in the ass that no one uses it, then its impact in the real world will be zero.

I totally agree with you about OTP being a pain in the ass to manage, but as far as its impact in the real world, you could not be more wrong.

Numbers Stations have relied on OTP for decades, and continue to do so till today.

Like anything, it depends how much you want a to protect your communications. If OTP is going to save your life, as in espionage, it becomes much less of a pain in the ass. If you want to encrypt your daily email with the 20 people in your Mozilla address book, then things get very messy very quickly, and of course, you can forget stuff like ecommerce, which instantly become "unwieldly" to put it mildly.

Not really. It would simply switch from broadcast and ciphers to the diplomatic bag and codes

Where of course, Numbers Stations come in.

For all the advances in asymetric cryptography, Numbers Stations / OTP has remained the system of choice for many organizations. This says something about asymetric cryptography; either that it isnt trusted, that its impractical for espionage, or something else...

Goto:

http://www.ibmpcug.co.uk/~irdial/catfix.htm

Where you can download the entire Conet Project. Be sure to buy a t-shirt or a physical copy if you liked it.

i don't know what the "numbers stations" link was supposed to be, but i'm pretty sure it's referencing the shortwave stations that are the subject of the conet project. If anyone knows of some online recordings of these, I'd love to hear them, but I'm not going to shell out $$ to listen to people read numbers.

Every article or image that is produced by copyright concious organizations is marked as being copyrighted, with the © and owners name.

Its high time that there was a unique, instantly recognisable symbol for everything that is released under one of the new copyright licences.

The article in question does not have a symbol to mark it as Open Content or Copyleft or Free Content. Unmarked articles are by default, copyrighted upon creation according to the Berne Convention, so if the article was not about copyleft content, one would immediately assume that it was copyrighted if you were to come across it. You would immediately refrain from using it for fear of being sued, and they could claim that it was not freed, because it is not marked as freed.

If this idea of freed content and the freed content itself are to spread, then all content released under these licences needs to be clearly marked as freed; as clearly as the IP that is traditionally copyrighted.

At this page we have created a set of graphic devices to solve this problem.

Using the old © inverted is about as inelegant a solution as you could dream up. It sends the wrong signals, that in some way, Open Content or Copyleft is "upside down", "wrong way around" or the polar opposite of Copyright, which it is not. Copyright is seen, almost universally, as A Good Thing®. The opposite of a good thing is a bad thing. The use of the inverted © conveys a kind of "upside down crucifix" vibe which is counterproductive.

The new symbol solves this problem, scales graphically for both print and web, and conveys the idea that the properties that it is attached to are licenced content.

Acrobat Pro allows you to edit PDFs, and with Ghostscript, you can edit PDFs and strip the "security" from encrypted PDFs leaving you with the original, 100% editable file.

PDFs are editable, you just need the right tools.

For sure, I will be out with my VLF reciever to see if there are any whistlers. Ideally, one would decamp immediately to northern Sweden or Alaska to be certain of getting under some Aurora. Its quite interesting that the sound of Aurora and solar flare activity arent used in Discovery Channel programmes, news programmes & such like; its sounds MUCH better than the cheezy muzak that they normally use to illustrate the moving pictures.

Here are some numbers stations links.

There are 5 different messages to crack :

1.E3 (The Lincolnshire Poacher)
2.E5 (CIA Counting Station)
3.E22 (New Station!)
4.E10 (Phonetic Alphabet Station)
5.G2 (The Swedish Rhapsody)

And (look at the last line) " The Prize for the first person to email us a deciphered text along with the method employed in the crack will be an ancient Gold Roman coin. The Judges decision is final. "

Also you have to encrypt using their PGP key, not yours, so you aren't 'proving your identity', just (hopefully) making sure nobody besides them can read your email. However that doesn't mean the NSA/Men In Black won't say hello if you crack it.

There are 5 different messages to crack :

1.E3 (The Lincolnshire Poacher)
2.E5 (CIA Counting Station)
3.E22 (New Station!)
4.E10 (Phonetic Alphabet Station)
5.G2 (The Swedish Rhapsody)

And (look at the last line) " The Prize for the first person to email us a deciphered text along with the method employed in the crack will be an ancient Gold Roman coin. The Judges decision is final. "

Also you have to encrypt using their PGP key, not yours, so you aren't 'proving your identity', just (hopefully) making sure nobody besides them can read your email. However that doesn't mean the NSA/Men In Black won't say hello if you crack it.

There are 5 different messages to crack :

1.E3 (The Lincolnshire Poacher)
2.E5 (CIA Counting Station)
3.E22 (New Station!)
4.E10 (Phonetic Alphabet Station)
5.G2 (The Swedish Rhapsody)

And (look at the last line) " The Prize for the first person to email us a deciphered text along with the method employed in the crack will be an ancient Gold Roman coin. The Judges decision is final. "

Also you have to encrypt using their PGP key, not yours, so you aren't 'proving your identity', just (hopefully) making sure nobody besides them can read your email. However that doesn't mean the NSA/Men In Black won't say hello if you crack it.

There are 5 different messages to crack :

1.E3 (The Lincolnshire Poacher)
2.E5 (CIA Counting Station)
3.E22 (New Station!)
4.E10 (Phonetic Alphabet Station)
5.G2 (The Swedish Rhapsody)

And (look at the last line) " The Prize for the first person to email us a deciphered text along with the method employed in the crack will be an ancient Gold Roman coin. The Judges decision is final. "

Also you have to encrypt using their PGP key, not yours, so you aren't 'proving your identity', just (hopefully) making sure nobody besides them can read your email. However that doesn't mean the NSA/Men In Black won't say hello if you crack it.

There are 5 different messages to crack :

1.E3 (The Lincolnshire Poacher)
2.E5 (CIA Counting Station)
3.E22 (New Station!)
4.E10 (Phonetic Alphabet Station)
5.G2 (The Swedish Rhapsody)

And (look at the last line) " The Prize for the first person to email us a deciphered text along with the method employed in the crack will be an ancient Gold Roman coin. The Judges decision is final. "

Also you have to encrypt using their PGP key, not yours, so you aren't 'proving your identity', just (hopefully) making sure nobody besides them can read your email. However that doesn't mean the NSA/Men In Black won't say hello if you crack it.

I've been thrilled by the mystery of numbers stations since I was a young'un. I think it's the simplicty that makes them so fascinating. So many conspiracy theories and supernatural phemonena (crop circles, alien abductions, JFK, etc.) are complex and full of half-truths and hoaxes.

Numbers stations are so simple, elegant, yet mysterious. (Therefore mysterious?) You can have any theory that you want (and they're all probably far more interesting than the truth), and there's little evidence on way or the other.

I only discovered The Conet Project through /. a few months ago, but I think they're great. It takes a lot of time to study this kind of stuff, with no likely returns from the work.

Like I said, useless post. :) But at least I'm posting at 1 instead of 2...

-Waldo

This cryptographic challenge is more daunting than the RSA challenge, because nothing is known about the algorithm used to encipher LP transmissions. We do not even know for sure who the transmitting party is.

Someone needs to have an insight as to a useful crypanalytic attack, to use all that hardware.