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Cyrillic Projector Code Finally Cracked
SimuAndy writes "An international group of cryptographers, the Kryptos Group, announced this week that the decade-old Cyrillic Projector Code has been cracked, and that it deciphers to some classified KGB instructions and correspondence. The Cyrillic Projector is an encrypted sculpture at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, that was created by Washington DC artist James Sanborn in the early 1990s. It was inspired by the encrypted Kryptos sculpture that Sanborn created two years earlier for CIA Headquarters. The message on the Cyrillic Projector has turned out to be in two parts. The decrypted first part is a Russian text encouraging secret agents to psychologically control potential sources of information. The second part appears to be a partial quote from classified KGB correspondence about the Soviet dissident Sakharov, with concerns that his report to the Pugwash conference was being used by the Americans for an anti-Soviet agenda."
have been ex-KGB agents that could have told them the code anyway?
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
A cryptographic statue? Whatever next! Cryptographic silicon?
about the KGB. An eyeopener. It's a non-subscriber link.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
In other news, the KGB has filed a lawsuit against the Kryptos Group under the DMCA, claiming that their IP has now been stolen.
The sad part of this is that in today's world somrthing similar could happen.
It sounds like a crypto module in KDE.
Trolling is a art,
The USA is going crazy without their old enemy/friend!
and All I got was this lousy T-Shirt!
This
Cyrillic code crackers have been arrested by the FBI under the DMCA.
Did they manage not to violate any of the new laws in the process?
the decade-old Cyrillic Projector Code has been cracked, and that it deciphers to some classified KGB instructions and correspondence.
Thank goodness for that decade-old KGB info. The Cold War will be ours!
The coolest voice ever.
The actual translation is:
Keep information away from Moose and Squirrel.
It is relevant to the topic in discussion.
But, if anybody really wanted to know what it was, all they had to do was put a gun to the artists head. Some people just like doing it the hardway I guess.
Why was the parent modded down? It is related to the topic in question.
How difficult is this puzzle? "Not very," Sanborn says. Not nearly as difficult
as his first encoded sculpture -- a work called "Kryptos" that he created for CIA
headquarters in Langley, Va., in 1987. That code, created with the help of a
cryptographer, is so hard to break that the CIA "will never figure it out," he says.
So why is this news for anyone not on the UNC campus?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I hvae a wnodreulfly tirvial slooiutn but trhee is not enugoh room in the mgrain of tihs book to dsecbire it.
what did the parent do wrong by posting that link?
Now the Cold War will finally be over!
:D
Ah, wait, you mean this Iraq operation is not an extension of the Cold War? Why is it going on, then? Why are they cracking the KGB code?
Congrats to Elonka and crew on decoding it. We all hope you figure out that last section of Kryptos!
I have not heard of the sculpture or the problem before, however, the article talks of using pictures -- piecing them together -- is it unavailable to the viewing public (close up)?
Or was it a logistic problem of distance?
I also assume that the "meaning" of the text is that somehow, while breaking the code, you are the creator's source? There is the physical piece and then the art is the effort in breaking the problem. Does this mean the piece is less transfixing since we know what it says?
Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
In Soviet Russia, the code cracks you!
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
Please mod parent up.
Here is the 'mirrored' solution.
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
I've seen this cryptographic art all over in the modern art museums. There're paintings, statues, you name it. You can look at them for hours and still not know what the hell they are.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Isn't that what SCO uses for it's code presentations?
In other news, the KGB has filed a lawsuit against the Kryptos Group under the DMCA, claiming that their IP has now been stolen.
The sad part of this is that in today's world somrthing similar could happen.
I'm seeing a lot of messages to this effect, and they're getting modded +1, Funny. But it should be pointed out that the joke falls a bit flat, because the KGB did not encrypt the text on the artwork. The artist encrypted the text for the purpose of posing a challenge to its viewers.
According to the victory announcement, the original text is from "classified KGB instructions and correspondence." Now, if the Russians wanted to make a case, they could try to figure out who stole their classified "correspondence"... good thing that never happens to us. Oops.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I parsed the story title as announcing that the good guys had finally finished decrypting the font transformation used to obfuscate the source code that SCO projected on screen at that big press conference a few weeks ago. Silly me.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Unholy nexus.
It's about time! This kept me awake at night not knowing what it said.
Microsoft Windows runs on stress and frustration.
Rapelcgvba vf sha naq tbbq sbe n ynhtu.
Vg znxrf vg fb gung crbcyr pna'g ernq zl zvaq.
Zl Gva sbvy ung vf abg pbzcyrgryl sbby cebbs nsgre nyy.
...that Bruce Perens cracked this weeks ago.
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. BB
I go to school at UNCC, I never really spent much time looking at that thing. Now i'm going to have a look at it. I always thought it was kinda cool, but just some artsy crap.
It wsa neevr rlaely eeyrcntpd. It was mdae by smoonee woh hda a rllaey bda csae of dxlsiyea. Tihs is nto a cniocdicconee scnie tihs wsa reltncey plbuhseid on Shsalodt.
Aliens read this and laugh out loud!
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
COMMENTARY
The KGB's Man
By ION MIHAI PACEPA
The Israeli government has vowed to expel Yasser Arafat, calling him an "obstacle" to peace. But the 72-year-old Palestinian leader is much more than that; he is a career terrorist, trained, armed and bankrolled by the Soviet Union and its satellites for decades.
Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world's "kings, queens & despots," with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.
* * *
"I invented the hijackings [of passenger planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met him at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in the early 1970s. He gestured toward the little red flags pinned on a wall map of the world that labeled Israel as "Palestine." "There they all are!" he told me, proudly. The dubious honor of inventing hijacking actually goes to the KGB, which first hijacked a U.S. passenger plane in 1960 to Communist Cuba. Arafat's innovation was the suicide bomber, a terror concept that would come to full flower on 9/11.
In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services' priority list, including mine. Bucharest's role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington -- as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day -- believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak.
KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naive enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace.
Right after that meeting, I was given the KGB's "personal file" on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.
The KGB's disinformation department then went to work on Arafat's four-page tract called "Falastinuna" (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students. The KGB was adept at magazine publication and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions.
Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists in our international front organizations. High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a "personal hero" for him -- the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was "proud no end" to
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
Exactly.
... "lookie! this is how you decode HBO and Skinemax!"
Open standard mean's that there is inter-operability. not
The only thing that has somewhat stemmed the cable TV piracy problems is that it's illegal for you to own a Digital Cable box. if you bought one off ebay then you bought stolen goods.
Otherwise the DCT 3000 and 5000 , the most standard of the cable digital boxes in america would have been cracked wide open for everyone. Just like the crappy Jerrold and older cable boxes that were analog with some really lame digital scrambling sending a code to turn on the descrambler. (IVSS... inverted video supressed sync with the sync wandering around a bit.)
It's a great idea, EXCEPT I am sure it's a way to enforce the broadcast flag. if they can control your TV set then they can control what you can and cant watch. suddenly your DVHS copy of the 2007 Superbowl only play's audio with a black screen that says "UNAUTHORIZED"
no thank you.
Have a look at Elonka Dunin, one of the coordinators of the team that cracked this beast. Is that slashdot on her screen? I think it is ;)
-AP
Wow, my school has recieved the honor of being mentioned in a Slashdot story. The Cyrillic Projector is next to the Fretwell building, across from the Friday building (home the capitalistic College of Buisness). It looks kind of boring during the day when it is not lit up, so most might not notice it.
It would be kinda cheesy like a copy of "The Scream" on a throw pillow I have. However, it would be so cool to have a conversation piece like this on my desk. Thinkgeek people... call Sanborn and get cracking, I want one for Christmas... Who else does?
UNC-Charlotte.
UNC means Chapel Hill.
Nice Try........
Dear Comradski, send more Vodka.
thank you,
Nikoli out....
I posted the text of the article and notified wsj that that link is not working.
Please evaluate that article honestly.
Thank you.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
Dosen't this violate the DMCA?????
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I just ran out and took some pictures if you wanted to see what it looks like in the day. It's much more interesting at night when the letters are projected all over.
MAKE YOUR TIME
I'm so glad that so many people have put so much of their lives into solving this singularly important problem to all mankind. Now we just have to deal with the trivial things like hunger, poverty, and disease. Hopefully someone will solve some artificially created encryption of some meaningless document carved into metal in time to save the fucking planet.
Dumbasses
Please!!
-- This space for rent.
What, you mean digital cable boxes like these?
& langid=EN&dept=11&WLBS=fsweb5&catid=20 02
http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/class.asp?logon=
...one section of the text actually forms an image of a woman who is a dead ringer for a young Lena Olin.
The problem with modern art is that the uniqueness of artistic talent is dead. The great works of the past that we all recognize are valued because the talent required to make them was rare back in the day. Now, however, you can find a plethora people in the world with talent exceeding Van Gogh, Michaelangelo, and Da Vinci. Our liberal arts schools crank out people with this level or talent by the hundreds each year, and most of them are "doomed" to spend their lives creating office art and advertising source material.
High Art needs to be rare and unique to retain its value, and following the overabundance of talent and the disillusioned post-war post-modernism movements, we have been led to a state where Novelty is King. You can peg the art movements of the early 20th century as the real beginnings of Visceral Response and Novelty as the driving forces of the art world as it broke from the life-like imagery that had prevailed since the Renaissance. Fauvism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, and Abstraction slowly pulled artwork away from the technical yet evocative realism of the previous centuries and firmly into the realm of what we now refer to as "shock-value art." Artists like Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrain, and Ben Nicholson utterly rejected depictions of real-world objects and events. Later postmodern and self-impressed "ironic" works by artists like Andy Warhol coupled with the spread of high quality commercial art in advertising over the early half of the 20th century sounded the death-knell for the prevalence of actual talent in Art.
Now we have "kinetic scuptures" made up of seemingly randomly slapped-together piles of geometric figures desperately trying to pretend that the say something that wasn't said before by a hundred other "artists" in the first half of the century, icons of religious figures covered in human waste purely to piss-off people that the artist doesn't like and to give the artist a smug high-ground to pooh-pooh about censorship when the masses call troll on them, and empty fucking rooms strewn with litter and a fritzy light winning their "creator" hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes. Art is Dead because Art is in the hands of the Masses, and the little egotistic society of intellectual masturbation that makes up the patrons of the High Art world just can't have that, now can it?
Postmodernism is all about asking the question, "What is Art?" This is an important question, but postmodernism's attempts at answering it lead one to the conclusion that everything is art and thus nothing is art. Musical pieces like 4'33" by John Cage (which is nothing but him sitting at a piano not playing anything for that long) and modern unstructured rhythmless Noise like that of Merzbow essentially claim that tone, rhythm, and melody are completly unnecessary for music. All long as an emotional landscape is painted somehow, then it is music. At the same time, is makes the argument that nothing is music.
Similarly, in my mind the modern art movement is too impressed with itself. Every modern artist who generates a huge media flak always claims to be "pushing the envelope of what Art is." What a load of hooey. In the process of asking this question, they too are rhetorically hinting that anything is so long as it gets a rise. Does that mean that KKK rallies should be given grants for performance art if soaking Jesus in horse urine is art?
Modern art exists today much like the art of the past did, to provide the rich and powerful with something to show off to their peers. While the patronage system is dead, the wealthy let themselves be taken into the con and the spiel of the artist trying to hock their latest collage of rotten melon splatters and barbed wire. This sponsors the movement and gives them a chance to feel superior to their peers much like the Princes of Italian city-states in Da Vinci's time. Why buy something beautiful? The middle class can do that at any upscale mall store. You've got to get something unique.
Bah. I am ranting. I just think it's a shame that the only artists who receive large sums of money for their work now days are con artists. Talent is dead.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Actually this is a real technique. It's called "Rubber Hose Cryptography". A few hours beating someone with a rubber hose can be considerably more effective at cracking keys than a supercomputer.
Damiano
When did the US care about the intellectual property of other nations? Itself is all that matters.
I'm a student at UNC-C...I walked by that projector twice a week for a few months, noticed it was cyrillic alphabet on the sculpture...to my knowlege no one in day to day life has any clue what the thing is, or that its even a code
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Having Pugwash as a home town finally paid off!!!
go PDHS!!
sadly i am 23 yrs old
You can think of the work as an excellent example of steganography, as applied to a piece of modern art. You've just shown that no one looks at the crap, so why not use it to hide secret messages?
So, what was Alexander Calder really saying with his colorful mobiles? Hint: it wasn't any garbage about "Expressing the social dynamic of Man's inhumanity to Man using organically reclaimed steel" -- it was "secret nuclear missle base is located at 34.4N 75.7W"
Chip H.
I am glad to see some work like that, linking math, arts, culture, politics and cleverness. I wasn't aware about that sculpture but getting info about makes me feel good about the humans, I can see some hope at all at our future.
I used to teach in the art department at UNCC, (before this work was installed). The school has always made a good committment to public sculpture.
Most people on that campus probably don't pay much attention to the artworks around them, which is too bad. Still, it's nice to see a work from the collection there capture people's imagination and enthusiasm.
UNC-Charlotte's campus, not UNC's campus
...where all the geeks hang out
You wonder if someone has done this, but just made up an impossible crytpography code.
So the first part of it is crackable eventually, but just to through people off the rest is random...
I'm very surprised at the lack of understanding about this subject on part of slashdot community. Cryptography isn't something to poke fun at, and apparently this community is lacking the technical expertise in that area to have any intelligent conversations about this news. Perhaps I'm expecting too much of /. these days.
Sir, the proper terminology is Linux-faggots.
Keep information away from Moose and Squirrel.
Vhy voot Rawshians... (excuse me...)
Why would Russians be interested in Moose and Squirrel? Boris and Natash were Pottsylvanian. Not Russian.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
I used to walk by that thing every day on the way to class and I never knew it was a code! I thought it was just art for art's sake. Silly me.
..much, much more secure ;)
How do you represent some other Russian words but instead of using Cyrillic letters using similar Roman letters?...
For example... PECTOPAH
XOPOWO
xopowo
Has anyone checked out the CIA teddybear? The CIA are showing kids the important work they do.
JUST in time! Thank god!
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
If I were an alien, and observed your species making sculptural encryptions, I'd probably laugh.
-kgj
Indeed. Cryptography is a fascinating branch of mathematics, and breaking codes is much harder - and more interesting - than creating them. It is akin to the calculus: taking a derivative is relatively easy, if sometimes tedious. Integrating the result is usually much harder. If you don't know what procedure to use, it's nearly impossible. Even when you do know, it can be quite difficult - remember differential equations?
Additionally, it appears that hardly anyone knows anything at all about Russia or the Soviet Union. Perhaps two or three posts have indicated any knowledge, understanding, or interest in the Russian language or any other aspect of its culture or politics. I regret that I feel the need to inform people that the Soviet Union (including the Committee for State Security, or KGB) ceased to exist more than a decade ago. Youth these days seem to have no understanding of history. Studying the Cold War might help explain why the US maintains military presence in at least 150 other countries.
Given that Slashdot claims to be 'News for Nerds', I would expect the readership to be a little more... educated. As it is, I tend to stay away from here because both better synopses of the news and more insightful discussion can be found elsewhere. I'd say that five - let's be generous - perhaps ten percent of the comments are interesting or worthwhile. The rest are, to be honest, complete rubbish.
and I got three years at jail!
and I still dont understand a word!
how long until
Maybe cryptographers are using Slashdot to practice decyphering - look at all those cryptic posts and/or signatures. :)
hany
cool pictures, cheers. Do you know how they light it to get the projection effect?