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Mafia Boss Using Crook Crypto Captured

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the never-heard-of-pgp-and-email dept.

boggis writes "Discovery is running a story on Bernardo Provenzano, the recently arrested 'boss of bosses' of the Sicilian Mafia. He apparently wrote notes to his henchmen using a modified form of the Caesar Cipher, which was easily cracked by the police and resulted in further arrests of collaborators. Discovery's cryptography expert describes it as a code that 'will keep your kid sister out'."

7 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Substituion Cipher? by courtarro · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Even worse, people decode random-substitution ciphers in newspapers daily, for fun. A rotating cipher is even easier to break since the letters remain sequential. I guess we could give the guy a break though, since, according to the article, he only has about a 3rd-grade education.

  2. OK , he doesn't know cryptography... by Viol8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... but it still took the police almost 50 years to catch him
    so he must've been doing something right. I imagine the ceaser
    code was simply to prevent other knuckle dragging criminals from
    understanding the message, not a load of top crypto crackers
    at police HQ.

    1. Re:OK , he doesn't know cryptography... by SpaghettiPattern · · Score: 3, Insightful

      but it still took the police almost 50 years to catch him

      That my friend is probably due to the social engineering skills of his organisation. Probably a combination of convincing, bribing, forcing, scaring etc...

      --

      I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
  3. Re:You didn't expect by qwijibo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A good leader would delegate tasks like communication security to someone who could do that well. However, I get the feeling that someone who dropped out of school at 8 and became a mob boss may not have been keeping up to date on the latest management training strategies. =)

  4. Didn't need crazy encryption by 192939495969798999 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Odds are if you were holding one of the Godfather's messages long enough to decipher it, that means you had to get it from someone in the mafia. They took these from him, which is one thing. Of course you can do that if you're the police/fbi/etc. and you've captured the boss. If you're just some shmoe, you can break the code all you want, the boss is still coming after you.

    --
    stuff |
  5. Re:You didn't expect by lRem · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Given that he steered the mafia for 50 years, evading the police and keeping control over the organisation at the same time, furthermore without usage of any modern technology including cryptography... Well, I would call him a good leader. Probably way better than your typical manager with a bucket load of certificates.

    --
    Always put off dealing with time-wasting morons. If you would like to know how... I'll get back to you
  6. Re:If only.. by anotherone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Trivial to break. Wrapping the cloth around a pole is just an easier way of looking at every x letters. It'd take about 2 minutes to brute force the value for x manually, a program with a dictionary could do it in milliseconds.

    --
    Username taken, please choose another one.