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Code Book Cipher Cracked
AssFace writes: "The Code Book challenge -- I believe 10,000 pounds was the reward for it, and it consisted of 10 stages of increasing difficulty that mimicked the evolution of cryptography throughout history -- was cracked and there is a fantasitc description all at http://www.simonsingh.com/. Goodbye Simon Singh." It's a cool read, too -- both Singh's own writeup, and that of the Swedes who broke the cipher. Congratulations to the winners.
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Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
Anyone else have a hard time reading http://www.simonsingh.com/cipher.htm in X with netscape?
CueCat XOR encryption. Can they crack that?!?! Ha!
Unleash this team on the CueCat encryption! No, no, it's not that easy. They'd have to fight off shark-toothed lawyers with code books, while simultaneously engaging the vicious mind games of money-hungry legislators who pass laws such as the DCMA -- this is no walk in the park!
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
...anyone here knows what's the status on the Merlin Challenge book? Has it been solved yet?
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
PERIOD. Things such as this just promote the interest in cryptography and interest and knowledge in cryptography is feared and hated by governments and content industries such as those that make up the MPAA. Folks, you're not allowed to experiment with cryptography because it may give you the knowledge to crack technological protection measures which is prohibited under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Face it, cryptographic knowledge is a forbidden fruit. Unless you are a government employee working on a government project or a major (large corporation) copyright holder trying to protect it's assets and to assert control over it's content then you have no business to have any knowledge whatsoever about cryptography. Only criminals need to crack copyrighted material and only criminals need to hide what they say from the government. The government has our best interests at heart... AT ALL TIMES.
I guess because you cant arrest the person who broke it from the Ukraine without a lot of trouble. Bah, if only we could get The Man out of the computer world, then it would be a true match between encryptors and decryptors. Would be amusing to make the Internet a scary place again.
I brushed up on my C skills and started working on this challenge when it first came out. What's astonishing is the sheer geekiness of these guys. Factoring RSA keys on distributed clients and everything. Guess it would have been over my head anyway. Still, it was fun. Congrats to the boys. RB
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
You wrote: "Goodbye Simon Singh"
By this do you mean "Goodbye $10K in prize money?"
I'll bet that's not the way he see's it. In fact I'll bet he is thinking more along the lines of:
"Hello $250K of free advertising for my book. Yipee! Yippee!
It's there. They used the Fermat Text in latin and did a letter count (as opposed to the word count in Beale Ciphers.) - Read the PDF on Simon's site. RB
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
The Swedish site skips stage 5, only mentioning in passing how tricky it was, and Singh calls it the infamous stage 5. What's going on here? Have I missed something obvious?
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Infuriate left and right
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Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
stage 10 required the factorisation of a 512-bit number. Singh says the authors had access only to 'ordinary' computers but I'd think 99% of people don't have access to a computer with 4Gb of RAM like the winners did. congratulations to them on cracking stage 5 - now that was obscure!
It's how much your brain would weigh if you had one.
Wow, that is cool. Congrats to the Swedes. I wish I had that much time.... :)
-Moondog
How very odd. I'll have to send someone email...
Thanks for the PDF suggestion.
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Infuriate left and right
So Singh was just slashdotted and had to spend the whole prize on bandwidth. I have no signature. I am no one.
I don't have the link handy, but as they say (or ought to say), use Google, Luke.
-- Anne Marie
For those of you who haven't read this book but are interested in cryptography, I can't urge you enough to read it. The challenge at the back is especially enticing. I'm not sure if it will lose its appeal now that the answers are published and known, but for me there was something absolutely special about breaking the codes and knowing that I was one of the few people in the world to have done it.
I solved stages 1 - 6 and 9 (I was on the 2nd team to brute force the Stage 9 DES cipher). Stage 7 was the ADFGVX cipher used in WWI and Stage 8 was the infamouse Enigma cipher used in WWII. For those who haven't had a crack at this, it's certainly worth it. IMO there is nothing quite like revealing a code piece by piece. I was privelaged or lucky enough to decipher some of the hints on the eGroups message board and be one of the first few to solve Stage 5, and the elation from seeing--for the first time--what only a few people have ever seen is nearly indescribable.
In summary, this was a wonderful book and an excellent adventure. Best wishes to the Swedish smarties who actually cracked Stage 10 (they had to pick between brute forcing triple DES or 512-bit RSA) and to everyone else who contributed along the way. It has certainly been an excellent experience!
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Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
who seems to have a liking for beans.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The explanation does not really skip stage 5. The report was written in TeX and converted to dvi, PostScript, PDF and HTML. Some of these conversion come out better than the others. The conversion to HTML is somehow buggy so it missed the fifth stage. I do promise you that we did solve stage 5 even if it almost made us give up. I mean we searched for that keytext for more than six months and tried almost anything else we could possibly think of. /Fredrik Almgren
This is the first time "normal" computer hardware has been used to break a 512-bit RSA key.
The first public break of an RSA key of this size was performed using 224 CPU hours on a Cray C916 whilst the team that cracked the codebook puzzles took just 13 days on a quad-Alpha Compaq beast.
Don't forget, before the export rules were changed around 90%+ of all "secure" SSL transactions on the internet were using 512-bit keys. Scary, huh?
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"Mary had a crypto key, she kept it in escrow, and everything that Mary said, the Feds were sure to know."
I was most intrigued by the descriptiong of the bi-slicing technique that the Swedish team used in their Stage 9 key search. They realised that the DES algorithm could be implemented using only boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT etc.) and so caluclated 32 keys simultaneously by using each bit of a 32-bit word to represent a different key.
So basically they were searching 32 keys at once, which is a very clever use of resources. Does anyone know if the Distributed.Net clients use similar techniques to speed up the RC5 key searches, or is it impossible to implement RC5 using the boolean operators?
I dont have the book. Is there a page on the net with the actual questions? The pdf file by the winning team mentions that they ocr`d it - does that exist anywhere?
"when are people going to clue into the fact that white text on a black background, while uber cool looking, is pretty much un-readable. "
is? IS??
whats the point of having IMHO when you dont use it. Its just an opinion. I prefer white on black, as it means theres no flashing monitor to give me a headache!
It's interesting the mystique that is invoked whenever someone talks about a highly-funded government agency. What maks anyone think that just because they're the CIA they have people who are soooo much smarter than everyone else that they can just do this without trying? I think it far more likely that the CIA would have sent a team in to kidnap the guy who knew the answers, rather than invest the intellectual effort involved in cracking the code. There's no evidence that the CIA is any smarter than anyone else in the world. And yes I think you watch too much X-files.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Is it just a co-incidence that the challenge has been completed just as his new TV series airs?
Wake me up when someone cracks DirecTV's HU card.
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whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
What's interesting about this is that they used the cryptography from the book as a form of authentication! Sort of like a digital signature in reverse. If he was the real Simon Singh, he would have already known the plaintext to #10, and could use that to identify himself. And if he weren't, then he would presumably be from a team that had already solved it, so why bother calling them? (Yeah, I know, they might have solved every one but #5, but the same challenge/response works for all the problems, and strengthens the authentication.)
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Mary used cryptography, she kept the key in escrow. Everything that Mary said, the feds were sure to know.
I think it flows a bit better....
If all of this hoo-haa gets you to think of actually buying the book, the author is selling individually signed copies of this and his other books (paperback) on his web site at list price, but with 25% of the purchase price going to a vision-oriented charity. Maybe a bit better than sending your $$ to BigOl' BookCo?
For anyone in the UK, Simon Singh has a new series on crypto on channel4, the second program is on tonight at 9pm (BST). You can find out more here
There's also a competetion where you can win a trip to Eygpt if you crack the code.
I confided in Paul Leyland, an encryption expert working for Microsoft
Well *no wonder* it was cracked!
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
You're thinking of NSA