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VoIP Numbers Stations were Social Experiment
IO ERROR writes "The mysterious phone number stations appearing on Craigslist for the last three months, which resembled their shortwave radio cousins, and which Slashdot reported on in June, were an experiment devised by security researcher Strom Carlson and a group of Los Angeles hackers to determine if encrypted messages could be passed using unwitting third parties to foil traffic analysis by hostile intelligence agencies. Carlson and the hackers presented their findings at DEFCON earlier today and gave away CDs with "Make your own Mein Fraulein station" kits and posted one final number station for people to try to decrypt."
Okay, and who's behind HELLO WORLD? It's been running in stops and starts since April 2005.
I'm still more interested in the orginals!
The revolution will NOT be televised.
from the article:
It seems to have worked.
Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
That's what they want you to think!
experiment ... to determine if encrypted messages could be passed using unwitting third parties
They managed to share anonymous information with others using only a site whose purpose is to share anonymous information with others. The fact that the encrypted the info still doesn't make it much of an 'experiment'.
Back in my day, we called that a prank.
Ha. Hah.
*golf clap*
You just have to love the simplicity. There were so many amatateur cryptananlysts thowring all sorts of methods at these messages. A sound implementation of a OTP is a formidable foe. --Chris
I think we're moving to a society where just being suspected of a crime will be so bad (in terms of government harassment like no-fly lists, wiretapping, etc) that the most important thing will not be to make sure that the government can't read what you communicate, but rather have no reason to suspect you're doing anything they don't like. With current advances in data mining, it's going to be an arms race - the stenographers against the miners. I for one am fascinated by both technologies, and frankly rather terrified of how they each may be used. It was be interesting to see, but one thing is for sure - encryption will no longer be enough.
Of course, if you are visible as a "citizen" through credit card purchases, debit cards, atms, banks, etc. and all your other traffic is encrypted... It might make a case for a visual tail to be attached to you. Warrants are only required for searches... not observations in public areas.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
"but one thing is for sure - encryption will no longer be enough."
You could always use your moniker against them.
Sorry, the title was supposed to read "Stenography >> Encryption"
> I thin k we're moving to a society where just being suspected of a cr i me wi ll b e so ba d (in terms of government harassment like no-fly lists, wiretapping, etc) that the most important t h ing w i ll not be to m ake sure that the government can't read what you communicate, but rather have no reason to suspect you're doing anything they don't like. With current advances in data mining, it's going to be an arms race - the stenographers against the miners.
A little analysis reveals your cause for concern.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
23 42 13 75 24 53 20 45
12 43 88 42 90 45 23 23
45 63 00 06 34 64 22 64
32 54 99 99 23 54 32 22
I wish i had mod points for you, thats hilarious, good form.
Stenography? What does the ability of a personal assistant to take dictation have to do with this? Oh, you meant steganography. I see now. Very cleverly hidden.
Well, I suppose this makes you next...
I think that was the point... As GP said, "the most important thing will not be to make sure that the government can't read what you communicate, but rather have no reason to suspect you're doing anything they don't like".
In other words, you'll (additionally) need to hide your communications, not just encrypt them. If the government doesn't know any of your encrypted traffic exists, or can't attribute it to you, then there would be no case for a visual tail, possibly excepting the "This person seems to have no additional traffic... that's impossible! Must be hiding it somehow. Put a visual tail on 'em." uber Big Brother possibility.
These trolling phenomena, encrypted or not, really get to me! It seems to senseless and a waste of time! ALL YOUR BASE BELONG TO US
Horns are really just a broken halo.
BUT GET IT RIGHT NEXT TIME
heres an example ov people suspected ov a crime and being arested for it
a t=1
"MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - Six friends spruced up in fake blood and tattered clothing were arrested in downtown Minneapolis on suspicion of toting "simulated weapons of mass destruction."
Police said the group were allegedly carrying bags with wires sticking out, making it look like a bomb, while meandering and dancing to music as part of a "zombie dance party" Saturday night."
http://www.kstp.com/article/stories/S17817.html?c
People dressed up like its halloween when its not actually halloween?! must be terrorism. look at the way those kids dance. Spo0o0o0oky!
Wouldn't it have been just as effective to just write the numbers into the craig:s list pointing right fromt he start? What's the point of the VOIP nonsense?
Oh, and:
Group 214
80020 21085 00601 30690
01201 50240 07006 01601
70690 01702 40050 14024
00908 70220 67089 00820
10086 07801 30240 02707
30130 15006 09306 20084
00000 00210 03070 03107
02706 70000 07016 01201
Q
The clinical term is "smacky face."
e ws/2003/03/09/walqa309.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
Have a nice day.
The decrypted message is: "There are motherfuckin snakes on the motherfuckin plane."
Wow, fighting it out with typewriters against picks and shovels. Wait till the steganographers get in the act...
rj
Sorry, the title was supposed to read "Stenography >> Encryption"
You should probably use a bit-rotation method instead of just a shift.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Wait till the steganographers get in the act...
Don't they need both typewriters and picks and shovels if they're going to write biographies of dinosaurs?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I'm beginning to think that the Suduko puzzles printed in the newspaper will actually turn out to be encrypted text sent between parties in small printable blocks.. the entire text won't be available for several more years.
:)
There's probably some dastardly plan in there somewhere
...how these guys didn't get a visit from a few nice men in suits flashing Homeland Security badges and asking a lot of questions. I'm sure that they had to have been looked at...
If the pen is mightier than the sword, I'll wager that the typewriter is mightier than the steamshovel!
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
All very true. Which makes it more important -- if you're up to some sort of "no good" (where 'no good' is defined by the people with the most guns in the vicinity) -- that you maintain a passable facade of normalcy, at least as far as the government/credit bureau databases are concerned.
If you're the only person on your block using encrypted email, and using it for all of your email, you're an obvious red flag for some form of side-channel attack (i.e. they just sneak into your house when you're away and bug your keyboard). So if you did want to use encrypted communications, not only would you have to hide said communications in other things, but you'd also have to maintain the regular volume of unencrypted traffic from your email accounts so as not to arouse suspicion.
Email use is a trivial example, but it extends to anything else that can be tracked. The exact same thing goes for purchasing patterns: if you're spending large wads of dough (in cash) buying things that the government doesn't want you to have (*cough*recreational drugs*cough*), then you had better make sure that the rest of your purchasing habits aren't affected, so that nobody can find out how much money you're diverting into your illicit hobbies, just by looking at the difference between your income and your creditcards+savings+retirement accounts.
I, too, see this as becoming a cat and mouse game; as the authorities become better and better about mining information, people are going to start to become more clever and more aware about not only limiting the information they give out, but about putting out patently false information in order to create a semblance of "Joe America" when in reality they could be the Shah of Iran.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Actually a while back I was talking to someone who was writing a little steganographic program (not sure if he ever completed it) that was designed to make "word find" puzzles out of encrypted or encoded text. So the result would be a block of letters that you could print up as a trivial word-find puzzle, the ones where you look for the words printed vertically, horizontally, diagonally, etc., but then if you actually analyzed the letters (I think he was using some sort of trivial cipher that could be broken via distribution analysis) it contained a message.
I thought that was pretty neat; "puzzles within puzzles" and all that. When you think about places where you can hide messages though, there are lots of opportunities when you have puzzles, because people expect a certain amount of randomness there. In a newspaper, there aren't a whole lot of other places where you can just have a whole block of random letters and not arouse suspicion; if you find someplace where there is already expected to be high entropy, then you can sneak in your encoded material much more easily.
Sudoku puzzles and crosswords could also be good candidates, but there are even ways you could probably work them into more subtle things if you had a predetermined scheme for encoding the message. I'm sure you could probably work the chess puzzles if you knew what you were doing.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You've just hit one of the biggest problems facing intelligence today square on the head.
In times past, the real trouble was in the acquisition of information. Now, the problem is on the analysis end: there's just so much information pouring in, nobody can even store it all, much less analyze it to any significant degree. You've got signals from the radio spectrum (broadcast TV and radio, satellite signals, telephone signals), plus all the POTS system voice traffic, plus actual Internet data in its myriad formats; it's really overwhelming.
I don't think there's any pat answer to your question. Obviously the intelligence agencies think that the best solution to the problem is with better analysis software and heuristics programs; stuff that can comb through the haystack and try to find the needle. But of course, those systems are only good at finding stuff, if you have a reasonable idea what you're looking for.
International terrorism, which is the bogeyman today, hasn't been around for long enough that -- in my uninformed opinion, anyway -- we probably know exactly what the "fingerprints" of an upcoming operation look like. We've had a couple of incidents to go on, now, but those are precious few datapoints to base future predictions on, or to use in order to seed systems in the hopes of catching future activity beforehand. It will probably be only in hindsight that we'll know of the next few incidents, and we'll have to use those to program the systems to sort the data.
Obviously, it's a very hard problem, both in the literal layman's sense of the term but also I think in the information-science sense of the term. My personal feeling is that it's such a lucrative problem, both in the public and private-sectors, that we'll get quite good in the future at mining through the rough to find the diamonds; however, it'll always be a cat-and-mouse game with people who want to hide their activities, whatever they are.
To go totally out onto a limb for a moment, my (unjustified) feeling is that eventually, the systems for doing this sort of information-processing will be biological in nature; either using some sort of simulated, self-programming neural networks in silicon, or will actually use neurons that have been plugged in to computer systems (literal 'brains in jars,' perhaps). Assuming we start to see the practical limits of information-processing on silicon, I see biological computing as being the next big step forward in information processing, particularly in the areas requiring a lot of heuristic analysis that don't lend themselves easily to more conventional algorithmic solutions. Data mining seems to be one of the few areas that would have enough possible rewards to justify both the risks and massive investment required, at some point in the future, of research and development.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'm sure someone has pointed it out by now, but stenography (shorthand) is not the same as steganography.
The mistake is apparently common enough that the first line of the wikipedia entry for steganography says, "Not to be confused with stenography".
4 8 15 16 23 42
Error 2101: all your sig are belong to us
Are Defcon likely to put up MP3s of the presentations?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Are these really resolvable issues? Ultimately, those two questions are the big ones in security. Mostly the second one, I'd say. But it's nice to be able to focus on them without having to worry that the actual cipher technology will make your efforts worthless. I mean, it's really saying something that we've only now entered an age where we can finally stop worrying about the engineering side of secure communication, and actually focus on the endpoints in confidence. As long as we don't forget that the channel is just the simplest part of security, we've moved forward, and finally have a really solid base upon which to build best practices.
No one cares, and Craigslist swiftly removed the "final number station" post.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
They've done it in this fashion to defeat Traffic Analysis.
This is a method of sending a message out, and having someone you want to receive the message, without other third parties being able to tell that a message has been exchanged. I can send you encrypted emails using any one of a number of secure protocols, and you can reply in kind. This is good on one level as reasonably no-one can read these emails, however it is trivial to work out that we're communicating - and this forms a pattern. Even if you can't work out what's being said, just knowing that certain parties are talking to each other is enough to build up a web of who's connected with who.
Exchanging data in the way mentioned above is a way that an interested third party is unable to work out who's sending, and who is receiving the message - if lots of people can receive it then it becomes harder to tell out of those who can receive it, who is able to read it, or make anything of it - ie, who is actually able to exchange useful information in this fashion.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
1. Post random number sequence
2. Tell people it was actually an elaborate social experiment
3. ???
4. Profit!
Surely this is different to (I quote a CIC) 'the next terrer act'?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
It would be insane to think that the purpose of the Numbers Station is to distribute new One Time Pads to agents using other form of communication - maybe so insane that nobody is checking for it....
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The article linked to goes right to his Homeland Stupidity site. This guy sits at home and lives off his Adsense revenue and /. just gave him a ton of hits. Unfortunately to help mask this, his previous blog http://ioerror.us/ now forwards to Homeland stupidity and any projects previously on ioerror.us are now hosted at homeland stupidity. Either way, IO ERROR is Michael Hampton.
There are a few slip-ups that still tie him together.. on the contact page... is skype name is ioerror_us and on the policies page, the email to contact him is error at ioerror dot us
Nothing to see here... move along.
Yes, those court reporters and others who record dictation in shorthand, will be the revolutionaries! Hint: Steg
(sorry, just making an obligatory Slashdot-style joke, nothing personal)
"[...] the most important thing will not be to make sure that the government can't read what you communicate, but rather have no reason to suspect you're doing anything they don't like. [...]"
In other words, abiding the law will become insufficient; there will be a new set of truely harmless things which will be met with punishment, but without any courts involved or room for defense.
Isn't there a possibility of political activism with this thing?
:)
I mean, imagine, just out of the blue, everybody starts posting or emailing around random groupings of 5 numbers.
If everybody does it, you are less likely to be singled out. It will annoy the hell out of the surveillance government. It will allow people who want to really have a covert channel to be undetectable. It will make a strong political statement, can become viral. Add a line at the end of the bloc of numbers to the effect of: 'I'm fed up of being watched. So, I'm sending around numbers. They could be some sort of communication. Or not.
If you're fed up of being watched too, let the watchers know: do as I do. It will soon become useless watching when everyone is doing it'.
You can very well imagine the same thing with telephone numbers. You post your phone number on a site. You can see all the numbers of everyone else who subscribed. You choose a few, you call them. Tell them: 'Hey! You're into this too! Kalaschnikov Ben Laden! And good day to you sir!'. Everybody which will be on this list can them communicate without fear of traffic analysis.
And who knows, you could end up talking to some interesting people with the same view on the matter as you!
Let's plant false leads all over the place. It'll annoy them, it may give us back our privacy, it will be, for once, a political act easy to do from your keyboard.
Let's all get red-flagged.
00005 45678 69815 46844 44684 00456 48466 48466 781548 45184
(Gee... I'm getting all carried away. Point out the flaws please
LAMENESS FILTER CAN BITE MY SHINY METAL ASS!!!!!!!
I had an example of a simple C program that would generate numberstation noise
and an example of it's output. It's best piped into the speach generator on
OS x (numsta #lines | say ) but lameness filter is not willing.
too bad.
Posted Anonymously because if everyone used this the spooks would be mad at Me.
I just found a similar phenomenon over at Blogspot: http://encryptedthoughts.blogspot.com/
It seems to have been created in mid-July and there are only four posts at the moment. Also, the posts use letters (all 26), not numbers. I'm not an expert cryptanalyzer, but I do the little Cryptoquip puzzles in the newspaper, so I figured I'd at least frequency analyze the posts, but it turns out they all have completely flat distributions. So maybe they use one time pads too. Oh well, something for you more advanced armchair cryptanalyzers to play with anyway.
I have a recording of a shortwave numbers station in Spanish here.
wow -- someone is in trouble now after outing all those CIA agents in porn
If defeating traffic analysis is the objective, why not just post the messages on Usenet newsgroups? They'll propagate to many thousands of servers, and even if it were possible to see everyone who reads them, a popular newsgroup would have so many routine readers that figuring out the intended recipients would be impossible.
This continues until I disconnect.
Even if I run no services whatsoever, they shoot UDP packets all day long. WTF is this? Do some ISPs block this crap?
Yes -- honestly I am very glad I was not present for this. I would have been disappointed and felt I wasted my time. Not trying to troll but this is a who cares story if I have ever soon one.
Hello World here is most likely just a trolling attempt. Back on topic, has anyone noticed any seeming correlation?
Cronologically, we've had social engineering (getting your passwords by pretending to be the good guys fixing a problem that doesn't exist, like AOL, Citibank and PayPal logins --even the nigerian email scam.) Then social networks like myspace, whquestion, forums... Finally, social experiments... once it became apparent that the web is reaching critical mass because it is interactive (you can get data back without needing prohibitive resources ro run your polls, and reach thousands without revealing your identity or purpose.)
If you think about it, experiments of this kind are nothing more than pranks to us and "data" to them. However, I fear that 50 years ago, pranks had no way of being widespread. These days we don't even know in which new ways someone will waste our bandwidth in the name of this "social science." Somehow, I feel dirty everytime someone uses terms where 'social' means computer related, because to me the line between hard science and the humanities is very, very thick. We are starting to see a blur now that "scientists" are experimenting with amounts of human guinea pigs previously unimaginable.
not so.
If you have any brain cells you would make sure that your "visible life" was randomized as much as your invisible life. Then your secret transmissions will be missed as you raised the noise floor so much their detection systems will miss it.
the first way to defeat any detection system is to make it go off all the time and the operatores will start ignoring it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Max -- Goods tainted. Consider extremely hazardous. DO NOT USE. Fate will be that of kings and counsellors who built for themselves palaces now lying in ruins. Must meet to discuss a.s.a.p.
from - to random phone numbers is about as secure as any electronic communication can be. there is basically no way for any machine to decode a handwritten fax.
That's easy. Don't behave like some pinko commie fag throwback from the 60s.