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"Decryption" of Bush Memo

Posted by Hemos on from the cool-technologies dept.

jjq writes "A decryption of the so-called Bush Memo, see the CNN news, http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/10/bush .briefing/ was presented at Eurocrypt 2004 (Interlaken) during the rump session. David Naccache shown how to recover words from removed text in several memos. See more about this story at Lemonde.fr (sorry, it is written in French)." Just use the the fish.

1 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. The technique by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The memo was written ina proportional font. It's a standard MS Windows font, so he can easily find the exact width of each letter (and kern pairs and the like). By looking at surrounding words, and allowing for the justification stretch on the line, you can figure out the exact width of the blacked-out words.

    Then it's just a matter of doing a dictionary search to find which words could possibly fit, and use context information to figure out which one of the possibles it is.