Cracking Crypto To Get Into College

Kallahar writes "New Scientist is running a story about a Canadian university who had students break an encrypted message in order to get into college. A good idea to grab a good student, but here in 'Free' America these kids would have been thrown in jail for violating the DMCA ..."

Comments

Re:The DMC is bad enough - you needn't make stuff

[AntiNorm]

shut up timothy - the DMCA doesn't apply when the copyright holder asks you to break the encryption.

You mean like when Professor Felten was threatened because he met the challenge to break SDMI? Oh wait...

Doesn't make you a good student

[gtaluvit]

Just because you broke some method of encryption doesn't necessarily make you a good computer science student. What about good design or object oriented techniques? How about math skills and knowledge of discrete mathmatics and its relation to programing language design?

Since I know scripting languages, am I an elite hacker?

Since I can install linux, am I a sys admin?

Since I can make brownies am I Wolfgang Puck?

IMHO breaking the encryption doesn't mean too much.

Re:Doesn't make you a good student

[Peyna]

Breaking encryption would imply good mathematical knowledge and higher reasoning.

I think this is a good basis for a scholarship and admission. Most other scholarships and admissions are based on self-written essays. At least it is less subjective.

Re:Doesn't make you a good student

[hyoo]

I think they are trying to find students who are more than plain academic nerds. A high school student who has enough knowledge to break an encryption scheme (even if its fairly trivial by todays standard) shows potential. High school does not teach the theory to be proficient in encryption and any student who demonstrates this skill must have put in extra time to learn (which is proof of potential IMHO).

I think that this is a great way to separate bookworms from brilliant people.

The fact that they can break the encryption doesn't make them a computer scientist, but then again a non-computer person can enter university and as long as they have the desire to learn they can leave with a lot of knowledge.

American universities

[DeltaStorm]

I wish that more universities in the US did this. It would help distinguish those that are intelligent from those that leaned over the shoulders of the intelligent.

Re:American universities

[stevarooski]

That would depend on the type of the problem given by the aforementioned American universities. If it was something that could be cracked by solid quantitative reasoning alone, I would very much agree--especially if this is an intro course you're talking about. Make sure that you're testing ability and potential, not knowledge at this point!

Not every kid who wants to try CS needs to be a math whiz. I was a Music major when I took my first CS class on a whim, and now I'm getting my Comp E degree. When I started, I didn't know anything about algorithm formation or discrete math.

..Minus the slashdotisms

[jesterzog]

From slashdot:

"New Scientist is running a story about a Canadian university who had students break an encrypted message in order to get into college."

But from the article:

"A Canadian university has awarded a scholarship to the first prospective student who successfully cracked an encoded mathematics problem"

And from slashdot:

"...here in 'Free' America these kids would have been thrown in jail for violating the DMCA ..."

Uh, yeah. Whatever.

Re:..Minus the slashdotisms

[Peyna]

He was a little closer than that, if you read the next paragraph:

One hundred other students who also managed to decode and figure out the problem were offered a place on the computer science course at the university. While it may not have been required for admission, and I don't know the size of their program, 100 sounds pretty high, so that may well encompass all incoming freshmen, or not.

Find my secret message

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh, if you can't figure it out
I must say you are silly
A stupid idiot
Please tell me you know what it is
Elite hax0rs here at slashdot
Roadkill, eww!

Shit, it's almost done
Enter Sandman - Metallica
Xeno is cool

You missed the point...

[Lethyos]

The point of college is to learn the things you have mentioned. Does filling out a college application or writing an entrance essay make you a good CS student? No. It just demonstrates your ability to perform a task involving some thought. Does breaking an encrypted message make you a good CS? No, of course not. But, it DOES show that you have strong skills in mathematics and analytical logic. Don't be so silly in jumping to conclusions.

Re:Link to puzzle

[embobo]

Well, I can tell you I wouldn't win the scholorship. That website was so annoying that I couldn't get past the first couple pages (including a splash page, barf) which talked about Flash being 21st century technology and all the l33t speak.

The REAL Story ... (the code isn't the challenge)

[feelafel]

If anyone's interested in the real story, they should go to this story in the National Post.

Amongst other things, it talks about how the code is the first part of the challenge. The coded message leads to a math problem (which is actually kind of fun and has a rather elegant solution). Solve the math problem, and you get into school with the chance to win a scholarship.

Having gone to the site and gone through the decode and solve phases, I can happily report that the "code" isn't really a code at all. As the site hints, it's basically "coded" by being written in base-4. The challenge is really in the math problem, which requires applicants to find the summation of all decimal digits in the sequence of natural numbers from one to one million. While this isn't impossible, it does require some thought and intelligence. I thought it was a great idea for students who liked math and computer science (the problem can also be solved with a simple brute force algorithm) but weren't neccessarily that stellar students nor interested in lengthy University applications.

Heck - I spent an hour coming up with a solution and then verifying it with a quick little Java program. It was fun! Give it a shot!

(As a Troll-y sidenote, I'd like to mention with some degree of bitterness that I submitted this story, except when I did it, I got the facts right. Apparently this warrants a rejection, and irrelevant whining about the DMCA warrants approval. Do you ever wonder why /. gets a bad reputation from time to time?)

Re:Man, this is easy

[feelafel]

I'm about middle of my course of 400 CompScis, and it took me all of five minutes to 'crack' the code, and solve the puzzle. Any kid who's done GCSE Computation (aged 14-16) should be able to work it out in less than half an hour.

Well of course it's easy for a university student, and of course it's totally possible to complete for a high school student. Doesn't make much sense to post a puzzle for admission to a CS program that nobody can solve, does it?

At the end of the day, Lethbridge was trying to attract self-motivated students. The students who actually take the time to decode the message (very easy) and then solve the problem (a little more difficult, especially if you try to come up with a formula instead of just brute-forcing it) are the ones that they want. Not neccessarily because they have the capability to come up with the correct solution, but because they've got the moxy and the motivation to actually give it a "college try", as it were.

Your flamebait comment about the implications of Canadian University degrees will go ignored, but noted.

Re:=)

[justin.warren]

Heh. Just beat me to it. Simple substitution cipher with all letters substituted for their position in the alphabet in base 4:

A = /001
B = /002
etc. Numbers, dates and punctuation not included.

Answer's 27,000,001 in case you were wondering.

Silly Question

[Guppy06]

If you have to know crypto-analysis in order to get into college, where are you supposed to learn crypto-analysis? Or is Canada yet another of those countries where university != college?

Re:The DMC is bad enough - you needn't make stuff

[DarkZero]

Actually, it DOES apply. Professor Felten was asked to break it as part of a competition, but was then prosecuted fo it. Also, Dmitry Sklyarov was not asked to break Adobe's encryption, but a precedent was set when Adobe chose not to prosecute him, but the US government decided to prosecute him in federal court because breaking encryption broke the CRIMINAL LAW aspect of the DMCA.

It is definitely feasible that a college student breaking the encryption on an encrypted message, even when specifically asked by his college to break the encryption on a message given to him by his college, would be at risk for prosecution under the DMCA. It is a very broad piece of legislation, the specific wording of which could easily be held up in court in a variety of cases, regardless of whether or not the defendant was asked to break the encryption and whether or not the person that originally encrypted it had a problem with it.

Re:The REAL Story ... (the code isn't the challeng

[Xerithane]

First off, I went into the site and couldn't even figure out the navigation well enough to even want to go through it. And, for a scholarship don't they think they could have come up with a little bit of a harder problem? After giving up on their silly site, I perused slashdot and was kind of disappointed that it was that silly.

The college I attended had an annual competition where high school students built robotics or coded something, and would give out some degree of scholarships or other financial assistance towards prospective students and I can tell you that anybody who wrote a program to find the summation of all natural numbers would be laughed out. These were things like kernels, AI schemes, language recognition applications. I fail to see the cool factor in this. Any nerd deserving a scholarship for brains alone should really be challenged and not something that can be solved by a 2 minute script.

Give it to the jock instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Your right, that scholarship should have gone to someone in athletics instead so he could get his CS degree. I think this is a good way of FOCUSING on students that normally wouldnt have as many chances at scholarships as your head of the football/hocky team types. Yes in some cases breaking encryption wouldnt be that hard, but how many people at your school would know how to, or even know how to spell encryption to begin with.

ummmm

[nomadic]

I don't mean to burst your bubble, people, but this was aimed at pre-University 16-19 year olds. Unless you're in this age range I don't think it's a huge deal to have solved it...

Re:the details

[caesarsgarten]

Yeah, you got it! It is just an ad that fits the organisation that placed it. As I mentioned in an earlier post: Even a computer major must not use a program to solve this problem. If your're unable to solve this by paper and pencil (mental arithmetics should be sufficient, too), you won't be able to write a non-trivial program, too. In this case the studies of CS would be a waste of time and money. Maybe it is more difficult to read and understand the hints given. A good student tries to understand the problem completely before getting into work with it. So it is not a question of easy-diffiuclt, it is a question whether the student has the right attitude.