Slashdot Mirror
FBI Issues Code Cracking Challenge
coondoggie writes to tell us that the FBI has issued another cracking challenge for a new cipher on their site. Tens of thousands responded to a similar challenge last year. In addition to the challenge, the FBI is also offering a few primers on the subject. There are a number of sites offering cipher challenges, but it's funny to see the FBI encouraging such behavior.
Love the article:
Hillarious.
moox. for a new generation.
The winner receives an all expense 1 way trip to the tropical island of Cuba!
or whichever foreign government owns the code that the FBI has just recruited the bright kids on the Internet to crack :-)
Houdini was always searching for better, more clever ways to perform escape acts and illusions. After he would debut a new trick, others would immediately try to emulate the trick. The trick was on them, though, because Houdini would frequently expose their methods (because it was originally his) and prove himself to be the true master magician.
No difference here. Just the FBI gauging the abilities of the community.
The links in the article point to FBI challenges in 2007 and the kids challenge but do not point to the 2008 challenge.
Here is the FBI Cryptanalysis challenge 2008 http://www.fbi.gov/page2/dec08/code_122908.html
Other helpful links for reference
2007 challenge: http://www.fbi.gov/page2/nov07/code112107.html
Kids challenge: http://www.fbi.gov/kids/k5th/jobs9.htm
Hm. Hidden message.
Dear citizens: Please inform us if you have the talents necessary to be suspects in criminal cyber-cracking cases. That is all. Love, The FBI
Except for video games and aliens, it'll be a bunch of crypto guys battling it out with Matlab.
It's interesting to note that all of the participants in the challenge last year got an all expenses paid vacation to an undisclosed location. I guess it was a really cool vacation since none of them returned home.
The company offered over $10,000.00 for not only hacking and cracking their server, but showing the company how they did it.
If memory serves (and it sometimes does not) they paid out the first and second years of the challenge, but in year three no one successfully broke into their web server environment.
I believed they kept eliminating modules that had holes and were not needing and closing holes in modules that were needed.
Based on what I read, they were able to 100% successfully secure their web servers from attacks only because they were using Linux as the OS.
I remembered comparing their results with others attempts with other operating systems and really wanting to learn Linux.
Now that I am using Unix and Linux and have a better understanding of what they were doing I can see the simple genius in such challenges.
Whether just for security or for scouting talent, whatever their reasons, its money well spent when they offer cash prizes to the few that are successful!
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
Well, actually, I think it's supposed to be
My blog
It was not, shall we say, stupendously hard. A little common sense and some patience was all it took. I expected that I'd be looking at something a little tougher than I used as clues in the scavenger hunt at my 10th birthday party.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Oh, come on. This is from an organization that cut funding for terrorism just before 9/11 to add resources to software piracy. Do you really think if they had the brains do do cryptanalysis they'd...
oh wait.
I suppose they are looking for brains, huh.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Interesting that FBI uses plone as their CMS and not Wordpress and they have IE compatibility CSS code like the rest of the planet.
Clue: Is there a reason why they have the crypto code displayed as a flash file and not a simple png or jpeg file?
"Be sure to drink your ovaltine"
What the hell does that mean?
I have decrypted. Answer is: U R under Arrest.
damn!
Wow. Cryptograms in the newspaper are harder than that.
stupendous. we
congratulate you on
cracking this latest
encryption. visit
www.fbi.gov/coded.htm
to let us know of
your success.
what it should be:
coondoggie writes to tell us that the FBI has issued another cracking challenge for a new cipher on their site. Tens of thousands responded to a similar challenge last year. In addition to the challenge the FBI is also offering a few primers on the subject. There are a number of sites offering cipher challenges, just funny to see the FBI encouraging 4J58I4JTK5NRO4844/4534852WDVJRIN67/368RB8XC0GJFNFXVXCVJVXV8R/GE8F/RETWQ8ER8WRHQ98CVUXHE8V09E8Q/WRWE8Q7T-E8THQEW/CHICKEN438R8SDFUEFNX7/4UDFJD7FH47FHEFT28FHEW6DFT
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
There are automated ones out there that solve this in under a second, but if you want to figure it out yourself try this page:
http://www.esg.montana.edu/meg/consbio/cryptogram/crypto.html
Here's the puzzle text to copy:
VFWTDLCSWV. YD NSLMIJFWEJFD GSW SL NIJNQBLM FOBV EJFDVF DLNIGTFBSL.
KBVBF YYY.AHB.MSK/NSCDC.OFZ FS EDF WV QLSY SA GSWI VWNNDVV.
It's a pretty simple substitution cipher, and the obvious web address in the code makes it even simpler. A simple bit of guess work and you get the result:
"stupendous. we congratulate you on cracking this latest encryption. visit www.fbi.gov/coded.htm to let us know of your success"
The lookup table for the substitution is:
A : f; C : d; B : i; E : l; D : e; G : y; F : t; I : r; H : b; K : v; J : a; M : g; L : n; O : h; N : c; Q : k; S : o; T : p; W : u; V : s; Y : w; Z : m;
As one UNIX lover to another...
tr '[abcdefghijklmnoqstvwyz]' '[fideltybravngchkopsuwm]'
Happy man reading!
Was the the only person who started this by guessing YYY.AHB.MSK was www.fbi.gov? Seems like including a fully formatted URL is a bad idea...
"Dictator Flakes. They WILL be delicious."
I actually started working on it with tr but then decided that I didn't want to bother with counting character placements to be sure I got it right. With sed I could just tack on extra '-e's as I deduced substitutions.
I hope they don't guard any sensitive data with encryption that easy
I've solved it and posted the answer for y'all. Check it out here: http://c0nn0r.info/blog/2008/12/29/i-pwned-the-fbi-cyphertext-challenge-in-about-45-minutes-using-a-pen-and-paper/
The FBi issues a code to be cracked with the simplicity of a 3 on a scale of 1 to 100 in terms of advanced technologies used in current cryptography. HAha - / they aren't looking for the 99% of society that can figure out the simple sub ciPher. Food for thought: With present technology in cryptography pushing the upper maxim of what we as a species are capable of understanding (in terms of entropy of data with a key) - lets just say someone went another direction. Intelligent "believable" misinformation is more powerful than anything else that could be devised in the world of intelligence. What would be the impact in the world of hidden secrets if an algorithm could encrypt a paragraph of data into an output resembling a ciphered textual paragraph instead of just random letters? Example 1: Paragraph A is encrypted .. instead of yielding random chaotic letters it yields a paragraph of of completely different content/context. How? Take 100 characters - First, these aren't words but 8 bit vectors of data. How do you you transpose 100 8 bit vectors into 100 other 8 bit vectors - the answer: very carefully and with a map along the way of course (the key). Yes it's 100% possible.
Example 2:
Take it a step further and instead of encrypting into another paragraph. Yield a paragraph that is ciphered with a determined amount of complexity.
What would be the advantage of having a barely breakable code, yield a cipher that wasn't just mono-interpretive? Pretty powerful.
The trojan horse of modern crypto-design? or just the fbi spending time putting up a code that I could break when i was 5?
It reminds me to the series of letters of George Mercies, about "Invisible Contracts".
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
This contest is nothing more than a fishing expedition to see those who are smart enough to break codes and brazen and stupid enough to have the testicular resources to demonstrate the same in public.
File under the heading "Let every flower bloom".
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
Maybe this is like those stings where the police dupe some idiot criminals to show up somewhere under the guise of getting some free stuff, then slap the cuffs on 'em. Are they logging the IP of people who go to that website which in turn is compared against a list of people they want to talk to? Why else would they do something like this?