US Government Using PS3s To Break Encryption

Entropy98 writes "It seems that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, known as C3, has replaced its '$8,000 Tableau/Dell server combination' with more efficient and much cheaper $300 PS3s. Each PS3 is capable of 4 million passwords per second, and C3 currently has 20 PS3s with plans to buy 40 more. Naturally this is only being used to break encryption on computers seized with a warrant and suspected of harboring child pornography."

Comments

What

[sopssa]

being used to break encryption

Each PS3 is capable of 4 million passwords per second

Something doesn't match up. For first the different encryption schemes take different times to try even one password, and even more if you combine several of them together. Secondly you cannot try 4 million passwords in a second if its encrypted content, it takes a lot more than that.

Re:What

[edittard]

Perhaps they're just hitting people with them?

Re:What

[plover]

It's a news article featuring small sound bites and quotes. It's not an in-depth technological review. Nobody quoted the environment in which they benchmarking their tests: AES-128, 3DES, DES, or whatever.

And yes you certainly could test 4 million passwords a second on these machines, but again it really depends entirely on what algorithm you're attacking.

Re:What

[Swift Kick]

You're right. The submitter didn't read the article (or lacked the reading comprehension to understand it).

The article says that "the networked Playstation 3s can process 4 million passwords per second, cutting down on the time necessary to find the correct combination.". Nowhere does it say that a single PS3 can do that.

Re:What

[blueg3]

You usually don't care what the variable encryption scheme is when you're cracking -- typically, there is a method of simply verifying that the password is accurate, which is what they're doing. (Brute-forcing keys is fairly foolish with modern encryption systems, but brute-forcing passwords isn't.)

Re:What

[commodore64_love]

+1 funny? Or +1 informative.

In the UK they lock you in jail for year-after-year until you give them the encryption key. So much for the right to be presumed innocent until PROVED guilty.

Re:What

[digitalunity]

gpg4win

It needs polish, but it does work. I wouldn't trust it though to not corrupt your data. I've used it with mixed results, but overall a good program.

Re:What

[Pentium100]

TrueCrypt ( www.truecrypt.org )
Rubberhose ( http://iq.org/~proff/marutukku.org/ )

Some others, but these come to mind first...

Re:What

[Anonymous Coward]

this commodore64_love is just trolling...

Re:What

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious: ...how does one encrypt files with a password? Any free software available for that task?

BitLocker for Windows Vista/7 does the trick.

Re:What

[sopssa]

If the encryption scheme is designed and done correctly, there isn't. Only way (besides getting the password out of the guy) is to brute-force all possible keys, several times for each encryption scheme and their combinations. Sure, you don't need to decrypt all the possible content right away there but just to see if it works, but you still need to go through every combination.

Re:What

[black3d]

For the first point, this is true - different algorithims take differing times to process. One would expect that this is a "best case scenario" with a relatively fast algorithim like AES-128.

As for trying 4-million passwords per seconds, its the way the process is broken down. They don't get the original laptop, network 20 PS3s into it, and have it spam the hell out of Truecrypt. They take a small header portion of the original data - enough only to verify their decryption. Then you program in a specific decryption algorithim in at a low processing level. You don't even have the same PS3 verifying the successful results. It just runs through it's parameters, applying keys to the data as a natural process, and sending the output to a secondary system. This secondary system (or cluster) is what verifies if any of the keys hit a result. The result checking is a lot faster than the algorithmic application, and can process the input from several systems simultaneously.

It isn't that one PS3 is capable of decrypting a pr0n file 4 million times a second. It's simply that a PS3 can be programmed with a algorithim and apply that to a sample string 4 million times a second. Something else processes the results. Remember - it's not trying to brute force the key, just the container password.

Re:What

[isama]

[sarcasm]You are guilty! You won't give us the key so you must be![/sarcasm]

Re:What

[RAMMS EIN]

Exactly. I may be using 2048 bits keys to protect my data, but I am surely not going to enter a 256-byte password every time I need to authenticate. That makes my passwords clearly the weakest link. And if you consider that I can't even use all possible byte values in my password, the link becomes even weaker ...

Re:What

[Hatta]

All very accurate and informative. I still wonder about the numbers here. If I did my math correctly, (282 trillion posibilities, 4 million tries a second) you exhaust the search space in 816 days. That's over a year on average. And that's if they're using a simple 6 character alphanumeric password. Given that we all have a right to a speedy trial, this just doesn't seem like it would be ready in time for court. I think they'd do a lot better to use their sneak and peak warrant power to install key loggers.

Re:What

[Korin43]

LUKS

Re:What

[commodore64_love]

Thanks for the recommendation. I don't like the idea of GnuPrivacyGuard (GnuPG) corrupting my files, but I didn't find any reports of problems on google so I'll give it a test

Re:What

[Wonko the Sane]

Your passphrase should be quite a bit longer than eight characters if you care about your key at all.

Re:What

[RAMMS EIN]

``Remember - it's not trying to brute force the key, just the container password.''

And you don't even have to run through the encryption algorithm for each password, either. You can get a long way by just storing pre-computed results for a lot of common passwords, or even every possible combination of characters that can be typed using the keyboard up to a certain length. It all depends on what is quicker.

Re:What

[MadnessASAP]

The keys could be stored on a 2nd secure device, something like a TPM chip that nukes it storage after 3 invalid password attempts.

Re:What

[black3d]

Addendum: Read the article further, and it appears that the author misunderstood. Each PS3 isn't processing 4 million keys a second - the entire cluster is. So, turn the number down to a couple of hundred thousand per PS3, but apply the same process.

Re:What

[Architect_sasyr]

it really depends entirely on what algorithm you're attacking

2ROT13

Re:What

[MRe_nl]

And that is why my password is"Pleasestophittingmeononotthewaterboardblipdoolpoolp"

Re:What

[Apatharch]

If by "year-after-year" you mean two years* then yes, you are correct. However, I get the feeling that's not what you intended to imply.

* Or 5 years in terrorism-related cases

Re:What

[MozeeToby]

You're assuming that all 282 trillion possible passwords are equally likely. In reality, 90% of passwords will be in the first million checked (real, pronouncable words), 90% of what's left will be discoverable in the first several billion (real words, intermixed with digits/symbols).

Re:What

[changa]

I Prefer Rot104.

Re:What

[cmiller173]

>Given that we all have a right to a speedy trial, this just doesn't seem like it would be ready in time for court.

... for sufficiently small values of "speedy"

Re:What

[Lord Ender]

The number of combinations in a 128b encryption key is roughly equal to the number of combinations in a 20 (random) character password, when typed on a US keyboard.

128b encryption is unbreakable even by military (2^128 is a cosmological number, and they only have astronomical computers ;-)). But if you use 19 characters instead of 20, the possible combinations shrink by roughly 99%. Compound that for each less password, and you see that a 10-character password takes about 0.0000000000000000001% of the time it would take to break a 20 character password.

And if your password is made up of dictionary words, or simple combinations thereof, you're just plain fuct.

Re:What

[ArsonSmith]

seems like it would be better to make a hadoop cluster and store rainbow tables in it of all possible password hashes. The old lmhash tables could cover 90% of used passwords in about 12G of space. Sure lmhash sucked and only had to calculate 7 characters worth, but with a few pettabites that have been mapreduced and ready to query it might not be too difficult to brute force almost any password quickly.

Re:What

[arth1]

This is why most apps that unlock a key with a passphrase are also rate limited.

So they need to bypass the normal authentication mechanisms while cracking, and attack the encrypted key directly. And thus they need to know the algorithm.

Re:What

[arth1]

You usually don't care what the variable encryption scheme is when you're cracking -- typically, there is a method of simply verifying that the password is accurate, which is what they're doing. (Brute-forcing keys is fairly foolish with modern encryption systems, but brute-forcing passwords isn't.)

This might be informative, but it's wrong. With almost all authentication mechanisms being rate-locked on the password entering side precisely to thwart brute-forcing, they can't feed the password into the app itself and not care what method it uses to decrypt the key with the password.
They have to attack the password lock on the encryption key directly, and to do that, they need to know the scheme (or provide an unlimited speed unlock mechanism of their own, which in turn also requires knowing the scheme).

Re:What

[ivan_w]

A 2048 bit key usually denotes an Asymetric encryption (like RSA or DSA). AFAIK, there are no 2048 symetric encryptions in use today (the largest I know is 256 bits like AES-256).

So, you *REALLY* aren't using a 2048 bit password. Your password is most likely a hash to a key used to perform a symetric encryption of the private part of a RSA or DSA key.

What happens when you use asymetric encryptions, is that your system generates a random key. That key is then used to encrypt your data. That key is then encrypted with the public key of your RSA/DSA key. The encrypted key is then included to the encrypted contents. The private key is protected by another symetric encryption (may be different from the one used to encrypt that data itself) - and THAT is your password since it allows you to recover the encryption key used to encode your data. You need both the Public/Private key pair and the password used to encrypt the private key part in order to recover the original data.

--Ivan

Re:What

[ottothecow]

+1 on truecrypt.

I have never used their full disk encryption or hidden partition (2 different passwords that unlock different stuff) setups but it seems to work pretty well for making a single container file that is encrypted and can then be mounted as a disk. Cross platform too...I even got it to work across the network with SMB shares

Re:What

[Hatta]

I dunno. I'd imagine that if you're committing a felony and concerned enough to set up encryption that you're going to protect it a little better than your webmail account. But maybe I'm overestimating people here.

Re:What

[Rakishi]

That's why any decent encryption or hashing system salts the password. Your tables are now useless.

Re:What

[Idiomatick]

This guy amuses me: http://www.darkreading.com/blog/archives/2009/01/how_hackers_wil.html?cid=ref-true
He suggests hackers can hit 1billion passwords a second. I seriously want that hackers setup :(

Re:What

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not true, it's British.

Re:What

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit on you - US law is heavily based on English Common Law, and the premise of "Presumption of Innocence" is not an exclusive US concept.

Re:What

[mister_playboy]

Available on Enterprise and Ultimate versions only, I believe.

Re:What

[kmac06]

A speedy trial once your charged. They can spend decades collecting evidence before charging you.

Re:What

[Anonymous Coward]

Year-after-year makes sense. You would probably spend one year in jail, then spend the next year in prison.

Re:What

[base3]

And the government backdoor would make this exercise unnecessary.

Re:What

[TheRaven64]

Not cutting it down much though. With an 8-letter password, using only lowercase (or only uppercase) letters there are 208,827,064,576 possible combinations. That means, on average, it will take 7 hours. That's actually pretty fast. If you allow upper case letters and number then this makes the average time 140 days. Add another digit to the password and you're up to 21 years (remember, these are average times; the worst case is double these numbers although it could be right on the first guess). Mind you, they don't say what encryption algorithm they are breaking.

Re:What

[Beardo the Bearded]

"Look, we'll give you a PS3 if you tell us your password.

"We'll even throw in the HDMI cable. We'll get it eventually; this way you and I can both go home before lunchtime."

Re:What

[jazzmans]

Sheeit, with a PS3 in the war room, slim pickens wouldn't have dropped that nuke on them damn ruskies, now would he? Peter Sellers could have called back Attack Plan R.

Re:What

[ehrichweiss]

I must be missing something here. WHY would someone use the original app instead of one modified to remove said rate limit? I mean the limit itself is going to be artificially imposed with something like "sleep(5)", so "cracking" the binary would be trivial at best, and the first vector I would think. Again, am I missing something here?

Re:What

[theaveng]

+1 funny? Or +1 informative. In the UK they lock you in jail for year-after-year until you give them the encryption key. So much for the right to be presumed innocent until PROVED guilty.

Sad but true. Refusal to share your encryption key or password is now illegal in Britannia.

Re:What

[theaveng]

(Score:-1, Troll)
by commodore64_love (1445365) Alter Relationship on Wednesday November 18, @05:25PM (#30149634)

Just curious: ...how does one encrypt files with a password? Any free software available for that task?

Why is this marked troll? Have the mods gone batty?

Re:What

[jack2000]

Suspected Pedos/Terrorists it said on the tin, so my guess would be either TrueCrypt volumes with AES or NTFS( w/ EFS) file encryption

Re:What

[selven]

If we're going into the criminal court sector, you could combine it with other analyses, like fingerprints. For example, if a person presses the 3, 5 and p keys far more than a frequency table shows he should that could mean that 3, 5 and p are part of the password, narrowing down the search space.

Re:What

[Ash Vince]

Why do you quote US sentences with other countries? "Innocent until proved guilty" comes from US, and while usually true elsewhere too, you seem to just flame with this shit again.

Sorry to disapoint you but your legal system is only based on ours (I am a UK citizen). The presumation on innocence and the adversarial system you inherited just stems from english common law. Here is a link regarding presumption of innocence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence

Here is a link on english common law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_law

For the most part it is a reasonable system so your founding fathers chose not to change too much of it when they threw off the yoke of english rule.

Re:What

[calmofthestorm]

No, you're right. They're doing offline attacks. If they had access to the computer while on they'd do a coldboot attack or something similar where they freeze ram in LN2, take it out, stick it in a chip analyzer (or liveboot the computer), and grab the delicious, delicious key material. Also, I believe windows lacks the ability to mark a page as do-not-swap* which means that sometimes you can grab the pagefile and find key material in it. Which is why you should use Ubuntu: Linux for Pedophiles:-)

* My info is 8 years out of date. Could be wrong.

Re:What

[blueg3]

Oh, you care what method it uses to turn the password into a key (and in most cases, how that key is used to decrypt the encryption key). But that's generally not tunable -- the encryption scheme that's tunable (I called it "variable") is the data encryption scheme, which you don't bother with.

Re:What

[maxume]

Well, if your password is something like "And if your password is made up of dictionary words, or simple combinations thereof, you're just plain fuct." you are probably okay.

Re:What

[blueg3]

Very few passwords are as strong as 20 random characters.

Re:What

[TheKidWho]

Please don't say "your founding fathers" the OP was making an ignorant statement and is most likely NOT an American.

Re:What

[blueg3]

An encryption algorithm requires a key. It is necessary that the key be entirely random. People do not memorize 128 bits handed to them very well, so having them remember the key is out of the question.

Hands-down, the most popular way of providing authentication is a user-supplied password. There are two major schemes for having a password provide an encryption/decryption key. Both involve using a one-way function, preferably a time-consuming one, to turn the password into a high-entropy key. This key could be used to encrypt/decrypt the data directly. That doesn't give you a very usable system, though, since there is no way of knowing, when a password is provided, that you've supplied the right password. In general, users don't much appreciate when their file decrypts to garbage because they mistyped a password. Hence, one approach is to provide a block of data supplied by the encryption software that can be decrypted to check the key. Another popular approach is to have this password-based key encrypt the data encryption key, which is supplied in a header that also enables the software to check that the password-based key was correct.

In both cases, for well-designed systems, the time to crack the encryption as a whole is dominated by computing the password-based keys, not by performing the check (either variant). Certainly decrypting a substantial portion of the data and performing some sort of analysis on it is not required.

Re:What

[theaveng]

+1 funny.

What's your password?
"Please stop hitting me."

What's your password?
"Please stop hitting me!"

What's your password?
"I TOLD you my password!"

(smack). No you didn't! You're acting like a child. Stop playing these games. Tell us your password!
"pleasetophittingme"!!!!!

(smack). Oh great. He's unconscious.

Re:What

[MicktheMech]

Unless those twenty random characters are on a post-it note somewhere since they're very difficult to remember.

Re:What

[maxume]

Precomputed against what?

Re:What

[WuphonsReach]

+1 on truecrypt.

But negative one for information found on the forums. I've found the members there to be extremely uninformed and opinionated.

TC is a very good encrypted volume solution. It's not a cure-all, as the contents of the drive are vulnerable to attack if the volume is mounted, but it's fairly secure. (Sometimes GPG encrypted text files are better.)

Re:What

[MikeBabcock]

This is something that Phil Zimmerman did an excellent job ranting about, as did many others, on mostly deaf ears.

Arguably a passage of text (including spaces and punctuation) from a piece of literature will do you very well. That same quote typed backward or with the words sorted into alphabetical or length order is even better.

Re:What

[MikeBabcock]

As opposed to the perverts who get caught with kiddy porn printouts in their bedrooms.

Re:What

[onionman]

I must be missing something here. WHY would someone use the original app instead of one modified to remove said rate limit? I mean the limit itself is going to be artificially imposed with something like "sleep(5)", so "cracking" the binary would be trivial at best, and the first vector I would think. Again, am I missing something here?

Yes, you are missing something, but it is a very common misconception. The "rate limit" is in the algorithm itself, not simply in the application which implements the algorithm.

Here is an example to demonstrate how such a rate limit can be constructed. Begin with a rather fast and strong hashing algorithm such as SHA-256. Now SHA-256 operates in the Merkle-Damgaard chaining mode which is inherently serial, so what you can do to slow it down is to define your password authentication algorithm to be a SHA-256 hash of a "message" which is formed by appending your password with one-billion 32-bit unsigned integers which are just consecutive counter values. Since you don't actually have to store the counter values, this takes no additional memory to implement. Since the algorithm is strongly serial in nature, you can't short-cut the process without breaking SHA-256 (which would be very impressive). Even on the fastest processors, hashing a > 1Gig message with SHA-256 is quite time consuming... at least several seconds per attempt. This provides a very effective rate limit.

Re:What

[broken_chaos]

There are (by my count) 88 characters that should be standardly-enterable on almost any keyboard. Assuming that anyone who is a crazy felon is at least as paranoid as I am, they'll be able to memorise a 12-character random password without too much trouble. There are around 2.16x10^23 possibilities (88^12), taking, at 4 million per second, over 1.7 billion years to test all of them. Once they triple this with 60 PS3s, they'll only be down to 569 million years or so!

Of course this could crack any old user's password in a few minutes – perhaps that's their real target, the general population.

Re:What

[QCompson]

Exactly. They'd dismiss the charges and refile them once they cracked the password. They only time limitation for them would be the statute of limitations.

Re:What

[theaveng]

So much for the right to be presumed innocent until PROVED guilty.

Why do you quote US sentences with other countries? "Innocent until proved guilty" comes from US, and while usually true elsewhere too, you seem to just flame with this shit again.

-1 Ignorant. The phrase comes from the United Kingdom which is what the GP was discussing in regards to the "share your password or spend time in jail" comment.

Re:What

[CentralBlank]

Did they figure out a way to access the GPU on the PS3 through Linux? As far as I can tell, the GPU is not accessible to linux and some of the RAM is unaccessible as well. Linux runs more like it would on virtual machine than it would running as a native OS. Most of my info comes from forums related to PS3 modding for home theater PCs and Im no expert. Anyone care to elaborate? If the GPU is really locked out, then are these guys just using a pretty average PowerPC computer with a few extra processors? P.S.this was posted earlier as a coward..sorry. now im legit!

Re:What

[falconwolf]

A speedy trial once your charged. They can spend decades collecting evidence before charging you.

Only on charges for which there is no statute of limitations.

Falcon

Re:What

[dilvish_the_damned]

You have a right to a speedy trial after the charges are in place ( and speedy is relative ). I don't think there is a right to a speedy investigation. I suspect it just boils down to statute of limitations, I would bet 816 days would fit nicely into that.

Re:What

[mindstrm]

No - the PS3 uses the Cell processor architecture, and even with the GPU unit disabled, they et 6 out of 7 processors operative (or is it 5 out of 6, I forget). It's not raw GPU performance, but it's fantastic number-crunching performance and cheap. The libraries exists to make efficient use of these - it's nothing like using a VM.

And remember, they're sold as a loss leader, subsidized by game revenue - try to get the same power (MIPS and power consumption) in the same sized package for $300 - you won't find it.

Re:What

[mindstrm]

Storage is cheap - they may be rate-limited, but you can also pre-compute them. Lots and lots and lots of them.

Re:What

[slashdottedjoe]

So put that on a barcode and use a bar code scanner. If, you really want it to be secure have the barcode created without you looking at the password. So, unless you know how to read a barcode, you do not even know the password yourself.

Re:What

[greyhueofdoubt]

Alternative password:

-bash: Password not found

Worth a shot.

-b

Re:What

[LoRdTAW]

Yea it all looked good on paper. We just tossed the curly judge rug and called it American law.

Re:What

[jthill]

distributed.net was doing about 35 billion keys per second in 1998.

Re:What

[sydneyfong]

I'll nitpick.

The presumption of innocence does not really go that far back in the history of common law. If you bothered to read a bit further into the link you provided, you'll see that in the quoted case of Woolmington v DPP (decided in 1935) that the case was about overturning a principle of the "presumption of guilt" specifically:

On appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeal, Woolmington argued that the Trial judge misdirected the jury. The appeal judge discounted the argument using the common law precedent as stated in Foster's Crown Law (1762). ... In every charge of murder, the fact of killing being first proved, all the circumstances of accident, necessity, or infirmity are to be satisfactorily proved by the prisoner, unless they arise out of the evidence produced against him; for the law presumeth the fact to have been founded in malice, unless the contrary appeareth...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolmington_v_DPP

*This* is the traditional common law, the one that the USA inherited.

I'll argue that this Woolmington v DPP case changed the law significantly. At the very least, before this case was decided, the principle of presumption of innocence was not as entrenched as it were after the case. Arguably, this case established the doctrine of the presumption of innocence as we know it today.

It's fundamentally some academic quirk on common law jurisprudence - under traditional common law principles, the law is "discovered", not "made" by judges. And thus, judges do have a tendency sometimes to "pretend" that all they're doing is applying existing legal principles, instead of changing the laws by setting a precedent. And then after the decision we'll have to accept that "common law was like that all along!", which is not really that accurate.

Take note, I'm not intending to glamorize the US system (which I don't harbor complements), but just to set things straight. I do study the laws of your jurisdiction extensively, as a law student in Hong Kong.

Re:What

[blueg3]

We're not really discussing ways of being theoretically secure -- there are perfectly good ways of doing that. Fortunately, most criminals aren't very smart. Unfortunately, they're often smart enough to use encryption products. Fortunately, they don't use them very well.

Re:What

[MaxToTheMax]

Even assuming we know which encryption we're using, it's still not practical. I did some math, and if the password uses all kinds of special characters, numbers, and uppercase/lowercase numbers, it would take way more than 5 years for 1000 PS3s to crack a 10 character password. According go my calculations, it breaks down like this: 630720000000000 passwords/5 years/ps3 = 630720000000000000 passwords/5 years/1000 ps3s... alphabet + numbers + shift key = 72 potential characters in a password... 72^10 = 3743906242624487424 possible 10 character passwords...

Re:What

[CentralBlank]

That makes sense...the article mentions graphics cards, so I was more interested in how they got the GPU working: "Condon said that any graphics card has the potential, including those in other gaming systems." I do understand how these are cheap for what they do...

Re:What

[CharlyFoxtrot]

For single files & quick and dirty: you can use the "crypt" command or "vi -C filename", it's relatively weak DES encryption though. Or you can use openssl.
For collections of files and disks : Truecrypt.

Re:What

[DamnStupidElf]

Arguably a passage of text (including spaces and punctuation) from a piece of literature will do you very well.

This is a horrible idea. Google already caches a significant fraction of all human readable text in the world, and more importantly caches almost all of the popular text. It's not hard to believe that the NSA/FBI/CIA have similar databases from which to try all the phrases between 1 and 100 characters (and all the acronyms formed from the words in the phrases, and the phrases backwards, etc.). Even with a petabyte database of text, it's only about 10^17 operations to try every string from 1 to 100 bytes, which is less than 64 bits of entropy. Further, trying only the most common phrases first (order all the text by google pagerank or by the popularity of a book on google books, for instance) would yield much faster cracking of literature-based passwords if someone picked a passage from their favorite book.

Re:What

[sopssa]

Unless you're entering the password all the time, that doesn't really work. And if it's something like full system encryption, you're only entering it when you boot. There's a lots of words you usually write a lot more than your boot-time password.

Re:What

[Spad]

The best part of RIPA is that if you genuinely do no know the encryption key then the onus is on you to prove it, otherwise the assumption is that you do know and are simply witholding the information; off to jail for 5 years...

Re:What

[Chrisq]

Could be worse, imagine if it was "fuck you, stupid customs official"

Re:What

[aussie_a]

You are guilty of withholding the encryption key. You aren't thrown in for being a child molester. You may be completely innocent of that.

Re:What

[tolan-b]

The burden of proof for loss of encryption keys was shifted from the defence to the prosecution before RIPA was passed.

I know they re-introduced some of the stuff removed from RIPA before it's passing, after the fact in amendments, but I'm not sure that the burden of proof was swapped again. Do you have a reference?

Re:What

[pilybaby]

you're convicted of not handing over the keys, which IS a crime. You're NOT thrown in jail for what you're suspected of hiding. It's because not handing over the keys is a crime, which can be proved (OK you could have forgotten them), but this is government thinking, not rational thinking.

Re:What

[Dr.Syshalt]

Something doesn't match up. For first the different encryption schemes take different times to try even one password, and even more if you combine several of them together. Secondly you cannot try 4 million passwords in a second if its encrypted content, it takes a lot more than that.

Congratulations. You've just destroyed their plan to get shiny new PS3s for the whole C3 department for Christmas. Do you think they're going to take it easy?

Re:What

[TheRaven64]

It's pretty difficult to do accurately. There are around 20,000 common words in the English language so, in theory, a seven word pass phrase is one of 20,000^7 combinations, or equivalent to a 100-bit key. A 9 word pass phrase is equivalent to a 128-bit key. There are about 500,000 words in total (1,000,000 including scientific terms and jargon), however, so the that gives 170-180 bits of for a random 9-word pass phrase

Of course, that's assuming completely random use of words. In practice, about 2,000 words are very common and a few, like definite and indefinite articles, appear in almost every sentence. Some words are more or less likely to follow others. This means that a passphrase-cracker (that assumed English words) could reduce the number of probable phrases a lot. If you add punctuation, then you add a couple of bits of entropy, but not many.

It's worth noting that a pass-phrase with English words doesn't have much more entropy than a much shorter random password. You can save some typing by just entering the first letter of each word in a pass phrase as a password.

Re:What

[commodore64_love]

>>>Perhaps they're just hitting people with [$5 wrenches]?

+1 funny? Or +1 informative.

In the UK they lock you in jail for 2 years until you give them the encryption key. So much for the right to be presumed innocent until PROVED guilty. This law assumes whatever's on your drive is a criminal offense, and presumes guilt.

Re:What

[Spazztastic]

Could be worse, imagine if it was "fuck you, stupid customs official"

My secret answer for a gaming account was "Your moms box." When I called them up and had to change my information, the guy asked me and I immediately realized what it was. Good thing he had a sense of humor, otherwise he might have thought my childhood superhero was his mom's box.

Re:What

[Hognoxious]

Actually it's English. Magna Carta and all that.

Re:What

[Hognoxious]

All that says is that one judge went against the principle, and it was overturned on appeal.

Note also that (re the 1762 quotation) this only applied to murder, and it only applied if it was proven that the defendant did kill the victim. Not that different to if you claim self-defence - you can't just say it or every killer would walk; you have to come up with some evidence that you were under serious threat.

As an aside, loaded weapons aren't toys. If you fool around with them you should be facing a minimum of a manslaughter charge.

Re:What

[hesaigo999ca]

Not really, if you have clustered envrionement, it goes much quicker then that per cpu, as they are distributed in an organised fashion, enough to be not be any visible difference between 1 or the other. Linux is great for this, as well, I heard PS3 are great for accepting linux on as their OS.

Re:What

[NotBornYesterday]

There is no minimum IQ for being a moderator. Sigh.

Of course, commodore64_love has been active around here awhile, and some mod may have thought he should have known the answer to his own question, or he could have attracted the attention of a mod-bombing foe or freak. It happens.

Re:What

[Ash Vince]

Here is a quote from the final deciding law lord Viscount Sankey on the page you mention:

Throughout the web of the English Criminal Law one golden thread is always to be seen, that it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the prisoner's guilt subject to what I have already said as to the defence of insanity and subject also to any statutory exception. If, at the end of and on the whole of the case, there is a reasonable doubt, created by the evidence given by either the prosecution or the prisoner, as to whether the prisoner killed the deceased with a malicious intention, the prosecution has not made out the case and the prisoner is entitled to an acquittal. No matter what the charge or where the trial, the principle that the prosecution must prove the guilt of the prisoner is part of the common law of England and no attempt to whittle it down can be entertained. When dealing with a murder case the Crown must prove (a) death as the result of a voluntary act of the accused and (b) malice of the accused.

This seems to imply that English Common Law has recognised the principle of presumption of innocence since long before this case.

*This* is the traditional common law, the one that the USA inherited.

Sorry, but that is utter rubbish. By the time this case was tried in 1935, the American and English legal systems had completely devolved so this case has no bearing on US Law.

It's fundamentally some academic quirk on common law jurisprudence - under traditional common law principles, the law is "discovered", not "made" by judges. And thus, judges do have a tendency sometimes to "pretend" that all they're doing is applying existing legal principles, instead of changing the laws by setting a precedent. And then after the decision we'll have to accept that "common law was like that all along!", which is not really that accurate.

Take note, I'm not intending to glamorize the US system (which I don't harbor complements), but just to set things straight. I do study the laws of your jurisdiction extensively, as a law student in Hong Kong.

You should have started you studies with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custom_(law)

This is where an awful lot on common law came from. Although very rarely used since we now rely far more on written statutes this was once far more influential when there was not a single repository of statute and case law that could be easily referenced.

My only studies of law were of the history of the english legal system. I do hartily recommend this book to anyone interested: http://www.sweetandmaxwell.co.uk/Catalogue/ProductDetails.aspx?recordid=766&productid=14738

Re:What

[NotBornYesterday]

I may be using 2048 bits keys to protect my data, but I am surely not going to enter a 256-byte password every time

Your passphrase should be quite a bit longer than eight characters if you care about your key at all.

8 characters is 256 bits. 256 bytes is, of course, 256 characters.

If he is using a 2048 bit key for his encryption, and he wants his password to be as resistant to brute-force attack as his key, he would need a password of the same length. Since 2048 bits / 8 =256 bytes, he would need a 256-character password. Of course, since he is ostensibly using ASCII characters, he points out that the actual complexity of his password would still be well below that of his encryption key.

Imagine that on a post-it next to the monitor.

Re:What

[tibman]

"Sir, we are finding a lot of possible passwords using the w,a,s,d keys"

Re:What

[PerfectionLost]

Interrogator: "Look, we'll give you a PS3 if you tell us your password.

"We'll even throw in the HDMI cable. We'll get it eventually; this way you and I can both go home before lunchtime."

Prisoner: "There are no games for the PS3, couldn't you give me a Wii with 4 controllers?"

Interrogator: "That's why this is torture."

Re:What

[PingPongBoy]

In the UK they lock you in jail for year-after-year until you give them the encryption key

Then it's time for two keys - one to convert the data into harmless filth, and another to convert the data into the real filth.

Re:What

[2obvious4u]

I have actually used something very close to that for websites where I didn't want to register. i.e. to pay a ticket online.

Re:What

[Khyber]

"Secondly you cannot try 4 million passwords in a second if its encrypted content, it takes a lot more than that."

Do you even know what a brute force attack is about? You most certainly CAN try 4 million passwords a second to GUESS THE ENCRYPTION KEY.

Who modded this nonsense up?

Re:What

[jimicus]

The keys could be stored on a 2nd secure device, something like a TPM chip that nukes it storage after 3 invalid password attempts.

Would never fly in most corporate environments. Nobody wants to tell the sales director that when they said "don't forget the password", they really weren't kidding.

This leaves you with the personal market for encryption (miniscule), military and government.

Re:What

[jimicus]

I dunno. I'd imagine that if you're committing a felony and concerned enough to set up encryption that you're going to protect it a little better than your webmail account. But maybe I'm overestimating people here.

I rather fear you may be. Encryption isn't terribly well understood outside the IT industry - a lot of people only know it's a way to make something hard(er) to read.

The various other issues at stake - choosing a secure password, not writing it anywhere, not using the same password for anything else - are frequently overlooked and it's only relatively recently that clear warnings about such things have started to appear in user interfaces.

Re:What

[Bert64]

Doesn't say what encryption they are cracking at that speed either...
Download a copy of john the ripper and run the benchmark, depending on your cpu and type of crypto your trying to crack, you will get anywhere between 100 and 100,000,000 attempts/sec

Re:What

[proslack]

That password would be much safer with a number and a non-alphanumeric character; Try"Pleasestophittingmeononotthewaterboardblipdoolpoolp1@". Something to be said for "l33t", I suppose.

Re:What

[Bengie]

2048bit?!.. weak weak public key encryptions. use a 256bit symmetric encryption :P

1 r3@lly HATE M2rry h@d 2 L177l3 L4mb

might take a bit to break that.

37 characters, uses upper and lower cast, numbers, and special chars. 72 possible chars, raised to 37 spaces leave you with 5.2638362183252302021313518106337e+68 possibilities. a 256bit key has 1.1579208923731619542357098500869e+77 total possibilities, but you have to cut it in half atleast. if you had 10 billion processors doing 10 billion comparisons per second, it would take 3.6717430630808027468154168254912e+46 millennia. but hey, if you find a weak link in the password and reduce the effectiveness by 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 your 10,000,000 petamips(assuming 100 instructions per calculation) super computer could break it in 367 years.

My cousin took an encryption class at his uni,which is top 10 in the world for computer engineering/stem cell research/anything science, and his teacher said something along these lines. If you had a 256bit encryption and assumed it was perfect, which means reducing it's effectiveness by 1 bit since you have a 50% chance to find the key in the first half, and assume the lowest amount of energy physically possible to represent a 1 or 0 bit, and ignored all other actual work required to test the key, it would take more energy to flip that bit enough times to break the average key than there is usable energy in the known universe.

not sure how true that is, but coming from a teacher in a top tier uni, that sure sounds impressive.

This really doesn't sound like it could be that far off. Quick google returns an estimated 7x10^22 stars in the known universe.
2^256 divided by 7x10^22 equals 1.6541727033902313631938712144098e+54. I'm not sure what unit of energy it takes to "flip a bit", but you have 1.6541727033902313631938712144098e+54 worth of those units per star. So I would assume it's atleast safe to say it would take more energy to break a perfect 256bit key than there is usable energy in all of the stars in the universe.

I think "brute forcing" the person would work better than brute forcing the password/key

Re:What

[sydneyfong]

All that says is that one judge went against the principle, and it was overturned on appeal.

The appeal was heard by the the House of Lords (functionally similar to the US Supreme Court). The best it could do is to argue that there is a "golden thread" in common law embracing the presumption of innocence. That is, in stark contrast to the usual business of judges analyzing precedents and decided cases or at least actual jurisprudence on the matter.

The judgement was based on rhetoric. At least the judge below cited something (see my quote in my original post). It might not be authoritative enough, but still it is better than simply saying: "no we don't do things that way" without much further elaboration. What this suggests is that there wasn't such a principle in the first place until this case was decided.

Note also that (re the 1762 quotation) this only applied to murder, and it only applied if it was proven that the defendant did kill the victim. Not that different to if you claim self-defence - you can't just say it or every killer would walk; you have to come up with some evidence that you were under serious threat.

True. Yet in modern times we think that if circumstances raise a possible issue of self-defence, then it is not for the defendant to prove he was acting in self-defense, but for the prosecution to prove it was not.

This difference may not be that obvious to the average person, but for defendants and criminal defense lawyers things like this is difference between life and death (literally, for those place which still practice the death penalty).

As an aside, loaded weapons aren't toys. If you fool around with them you should be facing a minimum of a manslaughter charge.

I'm pretty sure the defense was hoping to get the conviction down to manslaughter instead of acquitting completely.

Re:What

[sydneyfong]

Here is a quote from the final deciding law lord Viscount Sankey on the page you mention:

SNIP

This seems to imply that English Common Law has recognised the principle of presumption of innocence since long before this case.

In fact, no. In fact, this actually implies that the principle, if it even existed, was not universally recognized at that time. If it were, then you wouldn't find the judge saying "golden thread blah blah blah" but rather, a long list of boring precedents and authorities that supports his proposition. I just went to read the full case, and all he does is to debunk authorities that seem to support the contrary.

In landmark cases, judges (at least in UK, particularly those sitting in the House of Lords) have a tendency of stretching reality a bit to arrive at their desired conclusion.

Sorry, but that is utter rubbish. By the time this case was tried in 1935, the American and English legal systems had completely devolved so this case has no bearing on US Law.

You misunderstood me. What I meant was, the 18th century authority (which I quoted, and which I referred to as *this*) is the common law that the US inherited. And of course by that I implied that the case decided in 1935 had nothing to do with US law.

Re:What

[Hognoxious]

How do "circumstances raise a possible issue of self-defence" other than there being some evidence to justify it?

the prosecution to prove it was not.

How do you prove a negative?

Right...

[epdp14]

News flash: All of the servers of (insert opposition party) have been seized by the (insert party in power) government under child pornography charges.

Don't forget the terrorists!

[davidwr]

Naturally this is only being used to break encryption on computers seized with a warrant and suspected of harboring child pornography."

What about those computers seized with a warrant and suspected of harboring stored communications with terrorists? Are we going to just ignore them?? Huh??? Huh????

Re:Don't forget the terrorists!

[Duradin]

Thinking about children as much as they do can't be normal.

Hmm, there might be some ulterior motives for cracking those passwords...

Re:Don't forget the terrorists!

[commodore64_love]

Is that why Pennsylvania prosecutors have *twice* locked-up teens (for one night in each case)? Just because they took "mirror photos" of themselves nude? I suppose those prosecutors believed they were thinking of the children, when they locked-up these minors and charged them with a child pornography crime, but I don't agree. If a young adult can't even take a photo of his/her own body, then freedom is dead.

Call me paranoid, but

[Eudial]

Naturally this is only being used to break encryption on computers seized with a warrant and suspected of harboring child pornography.

... suuuuuure.

Re:Call me paranoid, but

[Groo Wanderer]

Naturally this is only being used to break encryption on computers seized with a warrant and suspected of harboring child pornography.

... suuuuuure.

No really, it is true. The guys that don't follow the law get much better funding, and they can afford to make their own custom ASICs to do it much faster. It is only the ones that take the silly 'legal route' that have to scrimp and save like this.

                    -Charlie

Re:Call me paranoid, but

[spanky the monk]

I don't think the OP even believes that.

Re:Call me paranoid, but

[Totenglocke]

Question: How does this get modded troll? Slashdot is known for it's blatant distrust of government surveillance, so how does pointing out that there's no reason to believe the government's claims that they won't use this for cracking anything but legally seized computers amount to trolling?

Re:Call me paranoid, but

[kelanden]

Presumably the moderator sees the grandparent as a deliberate attempt to derail the discussion. I won't say their concern isn't legitimate, but modding the post as offtopic would be more appropriate.

Re:Call me paranoid, but

[Valdrax]

Question: How does this get modded troll? Slashdot is known for it's blatant distrust of government surveillance, so how does pointing out that there's no reason to believe the government's claims that they won't use this for cracking anything but legally seized computers amount to trolling?

Because the mandatory sarcastic response pointing this fact out was already taken care of in the article summary. That's the line that the GP decided to quote and redundantly react sarcastically to, as if they were the only person smart enough to see the truth. This could be either Captain Obvious stupidity, a clumsy attempt to express a "Me too!" sentiment, or someone trolling by pretending to be really dense. I think we can forgive the moderator for going with the last one.

Re:Call me paranoid, but

[martin-boundary]

This seems like waaaay overkill. Couldn't they just, like, kidnap the suspects overnight and torture them until they confess about the child porn already?

Re:Call me paranoid, but

[Totenglocke]

Except that the line in the summary could be taken either way. We don't know the person who wrote the summary - they could be being sarcastic or they could be dumb enough to actually think that the government would only use it for legal purposes.

Re:Call me paranoid, but

[Valdrax]

Except that the line in the summary could be taken either way. We don't know the person who wrote the summary - they could be being sarcastic or they could be dumb enough to actually think that the government would only use it for legal purposes.

Doubtful. That's a perfect deadpan line. Especially if you read the article.

Honestly, which is more likely? That the person who brought this to Slashdot's attention is totally trusting of the government or that someone on the internet was unable to recognize sarcasm and thought that they were funny?

Re:Call me paranoid, but

[Totenglocke]

So let's say this guy thought the submitted was serious and though he was being funny - that's still not trolling, or do we have a new rule here where anyone who doesn't get a joke gets modded down?

Re:Call me paranoid, but

[MakinBacon]

We have laws against that. Also, you can't torture somebody until they confess because an innocent man will either never confess (thus meaning that his torture will carry on indefinitely), or falsely confess just to end the torture (in which case he will be wrongfully labeled a sex offender). Even if there was a way to find out if somebody was guilty using torture, there's still the problem that you would have to torture innocent people to find out.

Re:Call me paranoid, but

[Valdrax]

So let's say this guy thought the submitted was serious and though he was being funny - that's still not trolling, or do we have a new rule here where anyone who doesn't get a joke gets modded down?

Putting aside for a moment that the most effective trolling is that which only pretends to be stupid, he sure as hell doesn't deserve to be modded up to +5, Insightful for being clueless. Any preventative or curative moderation to take care of that is fine in my book, though admittedly futile since nearly any comment close enough to the top of the thread will get positive moderation, especially if it has a lot of comments attached to it. Even clueless, insight-free, one-word karma whoring posts like that one.

Re:Call me paranoid, but

[Totenglocke]

So basically, you're pissed that the guy doesn't trust our oh so wonderful rulers. Gotcha, all I needed to know. If you'd had a reason other than that, your argument wouldn't keep going back to "I disagree with him, therefore he must be trolling".

Re:Call me paranoid, but

[Valdrax]

So basically, you're pissed that the guy doesn't trust our oh so wonderful rulers. Gotcha, all I needed to know. If you'd had a reason other than that, your argument wouldn't keep going back to "I disagree with him, therefore he must be trolling".

See, you must understand what I'm saying. After all, the straw man is a wonderful example of trolling blurring the line between being stupid and being disingenuous.

But demonstrations aside, I never said that I disagreed with him. I just said that he's being Captain Obvious by reacting sarcastically to something that's already sarcastic as if it's not sarcastic and pretending to have "wit" in the process.

This wasn't in the commercials...

[Romicron]

Seems that the "it only does everything" slogan has greater scope than I initially thought - if "breaking encryption" was advertised explicitly, I may have picked one up...

Nice move Sony

[TheVidiot]

Nice that Sony took out the ability to install Linux on the slim PS3. How hard could it have been to have a left the feature in that is useful in a number of ways? Of course, they have recently announced the ability to post trophy acquisitions to Facebook.... but they take 'Other OS' support out?!

Re:Nice move Sony

[Hatta]

Sony loses money on each PS3 sold. If the government isn't buying any games, then this is a loss for Sony.

Re:Nice move Sony

[icebraining]

Actually,

ICE is hoping to buy 40 more original PS3s, through auction sites such as eBay.com, to add to the 20 it already has, Davenport said.

So they're not buying from Sony. Not could they, as Sony doesn't sell the pre-Slims anymore, which are the only ones that can legally run Linux.

Re:Nice move Sony

[MeatBag PussRocket]

its _NOT_ a matter of legality, its a matter of licensing, as mentioned elsewhere the worst penalty that Sony could leverage is denial of tech support. and as for the GP Sony hasnt been losing money on PS3 in a while.

Re:Nice move Sony

[Lord Maud'Dib]

I have on old fat 60gb (with the backwards compatibility) and recently bought a new slim. When setting up the systems I found that the slim didn't like the hdd from the fat as is. It would not boot and kept demanding a usb drive with the system on it to boot. Switched the hdd back to the original and it booted properly. Seems to me the system software is kept on the hdd of the slim but in some sort of flash on the fat. I'm mentioning it here because I've not found a reference anywhere to this difference in operation, but it makes sense from a cost cutting angle. Also, the slim boots more slowly, probably because it's waiting for the hdd to spin up.

Re:Nice move Sony

[mindstrm]

They left it in as a hobbyist thing.

They probably didn't expect people to buy them en-masse to build huge clusters - that's a losing proposition for sony, as PS3's are sold below cost as a loss-leader assuming they will make up the money on game sales.

Re:Nice move Sony

[sandGorgons]

ahh.. but the publicity. Every real boy wants the box that is used by the Men-in-Black .

HCF

[davidwr]

GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!

Halt first, then catch fire.

GAAH! MY PRINTER WON'T PRINT!! HELP!!! OH AND BY THE WAY WHAT'S THAT SMELL?

I see a trend here

[kammat]

The PS2 was restricted for export because people thought Saddam would use them to build missile guidance units. We're using the PS3 to crack encryption. I can't wait to see what uses they'll think up for the Playstation 4. Nuclear simulation?

Re:I see a trend here

[cmiller173]

Back before I changed majors from Nuclear Engineering (1986 ish) I wrote a reactor core sims on my Apple //e. Admittedly it took a few hours to run and was a fairly basic simulation but....

Right idea, poor execution

[beefnog]

If memory servers, the cell platform in a PS3 doesn't allow you to use all of the cores when you're running linux. So, for the price of a new ps3, they could just as easily use commodity hardware from last year and probably get better throughput.

Re:Right idea, poor execution

[beefnog]

damn sleep deprivation. if memory SERVES.

Re:Right idea, poor execution

[sternn64]

You get access to six of the eight SPEs of the Cell under Linux. One core is disabled for a better yield, and one is reserved for the hypervisor. Just the RSX is locked out.

Re:Right idea, poor execution

[klingens]

Sorry to inform you that your memory isn't serving you. The SPEs work in Linux just fine, it's the videocard that doesn't. In short, Sony doesn't want you to play games under Linux so no one can develop games that run on Linux (cirvumventing Sony's stranglehold on the hardware) for the PS3. Linux games wouldn't need to pay Sony for each game sold as the normal titles do.

Re:Right idea, poor execution

[CronoCloud]

More accurately you're limited to a non-accelerated framebuffer display. You can run Linux games, like nethack for example, you're just not going to run the ones that require 3D acceleration.

Re:Right idea, poor execution

[mindstrm]

The PS3 disables one (the GPU) out of six cores - the other five being very fast, and useable.

The very reason labs all over were building small clusters of PS3's was because, dollar for dollar, it provided a much cheaper alternative than any other solution.

What do you mean "simulation"???

[davidwr]

You must be young. Go download War Games.

Re:What do you mean "simulation"???

[commodore64_love]

>>>Go download

"Awwww! You're gonna get in trou-ble! Daddy that man said a baaaad word."
Yes I know honey.

Trust me.

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Naturally this is only being used to break encryption on computers seized with a warrant and suspected of harboring child pornography.

That is the only thing they use them for... Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, Know what I mean?

Re:Trust me.

[turing_m]

That is the only thing they use them for... Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, Know what I mean?

Look... are you insinuating something?

Re:Trust me.

[commodore64_love]

If there's grass on the field, play through

If not, retreat

Re:Trust me.

[amasiancrasian]

Well, how else are government employees going to convince purchasers to buy PS3s so they can play games? They can now "crack" passwords AND play Dragon Age: Origins! Win-win!

Re:Trust me.

[Jedi Alec]

Some of us like our lawns mowed, trimmed or even replaced by concrete, you insensitive clod!

Re:Trust me.

[neurovish]

Naturally this is only being used to break encryption on computers seized with a warrant and suspected of harboring child pornography.

That is the only thing they use them for... Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, Know what I mean?

The ps3s are really going to be used to have sex with a lady? How may I use them to this ends?

...do you have a newsletter?

New metric...???

[aztektum]

Each PS3 is capable of 4 million passwords per second

4 million passwords a second what?

Re:New metric...???

[RAMMS EIN]

I just accidentally 4 million passwords.

Re:New metric...???

[Thrakamazog]

4 million passwords a second, Sir!

wait a minute...

[thehostiles]

could this be used on the public end as well? And if a ps3 can break encryption that well, could it make it?

Re:Is this April 1st?

[MaliciousSmurf]

Uncharted?

Lovely encryption

[Applekid]

Good to know when the Government is cracking the encryption implemented by the public it's "cracking down on child pornography." When it's the public cracking encryption implemented by corporations it's a violation of the DMCA.

Re:Lovely encryption

[BobMcD]

I had this thought exactly. And likewise if someone in Iran had assembled a cluster of PS3's as a super computer, we'd accuse them of being involved in other nefarious deeds...

Re:Lovely encryption

[shawn(at)fsu]

submitter failed a lot in the summary, TFA says: C3 focuses on transnational Internet crimes, including child pornography that has crossed national boundaries.. It's not just for kiddie porn. It seems they would use the same tech if it was a suggested terrorist pc.

Re:Lovely encryption

[shawn(at)fsu]

Ugh, replied to the wrong post. I need to go home. Sorry

Re:Lovely encryption

[mea37]

1) The cases you tend to think about where "the public" cracks encryption implemented by corporations are DMCA violations. However, that's not (as you imply) because of who's doing it or who implemented the encryption; it's because of what function the encryption is serving. If I crack the boot password on your laptop, DMCA violations aren't what I'm guilty of.

2) Yes, there are many, many things that are permissable when done by the government but illegal if done by a private citizen. There always have been, there always will be. Probably the majority of things done in the investigation of suspected crimes fall into this category, and unsurprisingly this is one of them.

Now if I go by recent track record of how people respond when called on bs while trying to sound anti-establishment chic around here, you'll tell me your comment was just a joke, as though that would somehow make it any less full of crap.

Re:Lovely encryption

[mdwh2]

Indeed. They're way behind the UK Government though - who needs PS3s, when they can just make it illegal for someone to not decrypt any files they find...

Re:Lovely encryption

[Monkeedude1212]

I know eh?

It's ridiculous how I can't handcuff a drug dealer, stuff him into the backseat of my car, drive him back to my office, and record him alone in a room for about 12 hours before pressing charges.

It's a right no government arm should ever have!
Or its infringing upon my rights to say that I can't do it!

I don't care which! I'm just upset!

Re:Lovely encryption

[Pharmboy]

Indeed. They're way behind the UK Government though - who needs PS3s, when they can just make it illegal for someone to not decrypt any files they find...

Last I heard, that wasn't working out so good either. What is one more criminal violation when you are accused of several? Making it illegal to not decrypt files is like requiring tax stamps on illegal drugs. Yes they do it, but it seldom produces any results in the courts.

Re:Lovely encryption

[tepples]

When it's the public cracking encryption implemented by corporations it's a violation of the DMCA [but not when the government cracks].

That was intentional from the start. Title 17, U.S. Code, section 1201(e) words it thus: "This section does not prohibit any lawfully authorized investigative, protective, information security, or intelligence activity of an officer, agent, or employee of the" government or a government contractor.

Re:Lovely encryption

[unwastaken]

I had this thought exactly. And likewise if someone in Iran had assembled a cluster of PS3's as a super computer, we'd accuse them of being involved in other nefarious deeds...

Citation granted

Re:Is this April 1st?

[jonbryce]

Using GPU processing to crack passwords isn't news. In Soviet Russia, they have beeing doing it for some time now.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[Rattenhirn]

On the old (pre slim) PS3, you can install Linux legally and without any hard or soft mods. This was also possible with the old (pre slim, see the pattern?) PS2, if you bought a hard disk.

Wow, 4 million passwords per second...

[Animal Farm Pig]

So, with a brute force attack, I've only got 36,030,233,524,592,808,479,552,335 years before they will reach mine!

Re:Wow, 4 million passwords per second...

[JavaBear]

I wonder how long it'll take it to break it if the perp uses "id10t". Still, they are probably not using brute force.

Re:Wow, 4 million passwords per second...

[steelfood]

Depends. If you're using MD5 to verify the password that protects your stuff, you might be in trouble. Sure, that'd be looking for collisions, but all you have to do is find the right one.

Re:Wow, 4 million passwords per second...

[noidentity]

So, with a brute force attack, I've only got 36,030,233,524,592,808,479,552,335 years before they will reach mine!

Thanks, we'll just skip ahead to the password we would have be trying 36,030,233,524,592,808,479,552,335 years from now, and crack your encryption today!

Re:Wow, 4 million passwords per second...

[Tolkien]

Unless they nail it on the first go. :)

Nit-picking the article

[davidwr]

"He explained that the number of possible combinations in a six-digit password is 256 to the sixth power."

Um, only if the person uses characters that can't be typed on a normal keyboard.

In practice, the password "alphabet" is either 26, 52, 62, 84, or some other number not much above 84 characters. 84^6 is much less than 256^6.

However, in practice, people who fear the cops will use a lot more than 6 digits.

If the passwords are decent passphrases of, say, 6 words, taken out of a dictionary of even 2,000 common words, that's 2,000^6, or "still not that big of a number" as it's known in the security field. And that's if the person makes it easy by not using any spaces, using all lowercase, etc.

The real smart crooks encrypt their stuff in a way that nothing short of banging them over the head with a $5 pipe wrench will ever reveal.

Re:Nit-picking the article

[sweatyboatman]

The real smart crooks encrypt their stuff in a way that nothing short of banging them over the head with a $5 pipe wrench will ever reveal.

how would giving someone a concussion reveal their password?

Re:Nit-picking the article

[binary paladin]

Yeah. And there's no reason to do any "banging" anyway. Everyone I've ever wanted to get a password from just gave it to me when I showed them my tools!

Re:Nit-picking the article

[Wonko the Sane]

Um, only if the person uses characters that can't be typed on a normal keyboard.

If the smart crooks are using any version of Windows then they can access all extended characters from their normal keyboard by holding down the ALT key and typing the character code on the numeric keypad.

I used character 255 back in the Windows 3.1 days to make directories that no one else could figure out how to get in to. (DOS had no problem but windows couldn't handle a file with that character in the name)

Re:Nit-picking the article

[Lord Ender]

There are actually 95 typable characters on a US keyboard. (26 letters + 10 numbers +11 symbols) x2 (with shift key) + spacebar.

95^20 = 2^128, so if you're using fewer than 20 characters with your AES128 encryption, you don't really have AES128 encryption...

Re:Nit-picking the article

[PitaBred]

Bang them over the head? I'd go for the kneecaps and extremities. Hitting someone over the head to get knowledge out of said head seems a little foolish...

Re:Nit-picking the article

[DrXym]

The real smart crooks encrypt their stuff in a way that nothing short of banging them over the head with a $5 pipe wrench will ever reveal.

For every smart crook there are probably ten really stupid ones, and another ten who think they're smart but really aren't. Besides if someone really did use strong encryption, I am sure that law enforcement have more expensive means to obtain evidence, such as sending the hard disk off for analysis, or even renting computing time on faster hardware.

Re:Nit-picking the article

[bugs2squash]

Exactly... So if it takes more than 84^6 attempts to crack then the owner of this PC is for sure guilty of something. This system is only looking for guilt by association with strong passwords, it does not need to actually crack the strong password.

Re:Nit-picking the article

[Renegrade]

In DOS or Windows environments, you can hold down alt, type in a number to directly input an "extended ASCII" or Unicode character, respectively. alt-254 under a DOS environment will give you that funny IBM-extended-ASCII square, for instance.

The IT people at my highschool so many years ago couldn't figure out how I was doing CTRL-C when they disabled the control keys on the keyboard (they put tape between the contacts).. I was just doing ALT-3....

Re:Nit-picking the article

[selven]

But even if 99% of crooks are smart crooks it's a much better deal to catch 1% of them with 0.1% of the effort by sticking to alphanumeric.

Re:Nit-picking the article

[lofoforabr]

I have set up 2 keyboard layouts here at home (US English and Russian). I alternate between them using a combination of keys (running GNOME here).
All places on which I'm pretty sure I'll only want to access from home, I go and use a russian password or passphrase (yes, in cyrillic).
So, I guess my password most likely won't be found if all they search is for latin letters, numbers and symbols.

Re:Nit-picking the article

[anexkahn]

well that's easy...the password is Inside their head :)...the wrench is the tool in which to get there.

Re:Nit-picking the article

[theArtificial]

The real smart crooks encrypt their stuff in a way that nothing short of banging them over the head with a $5 pipe wrench will ever reveal.

how would giving someone a concussion reveal their password?

Maybe it's some kind of buffer overflow or denial of service attack?

Re:Nit-picking the article

[falconwolf]

There are actually 95 typable characters on a US keyboard. (26 letters + 10 numbers +11 symbols) x2 (with shift key) + spacebar.

There are 112 typeable characters on the keyboard of my Mac. I can also type special characters such as those with accents, diphthongs, umlauts, and others. When I want to I can type "Français" and "hola!" and "ß". There are literally hundreds of others I can type as well. However do encryption programs allow them to be used?

Æ Ê OE Ø ð

Falcon

Re:Nit-picking the article

[zary]

The real smart crooks encrypt their stuff in a way that nothing short of banging them over the head with a $5 pipe wrench will ever reveal.

how would giving someone a concussion reveal their password?

Inside joke understanding fail.

Re:Nit-picking the article

[fnj]

The real smart crooks encrypt their stuff in a way that nothing short of banging them over the head with a $5 pipe wrench will ever reveal.

I'm afraid that crushing the suspect's skull will almost instantly lead to unconsciousness and fairly rapid death through intracranial hemmorhage leading to the brain being destroyed due to swelling. Or maybe the brain injury will only make him a gibbering idiot. Either way, sorry, you're not going to retrieve the password this way. I think the CIA or foreign counterparts could help you with more ingenious solutions.

Anyway, no matter how many passwords you can "generate" per second, it takes a lot longer to try them out than to come up with the candidates. Any password security system worth a shit will incorporate gross slowdown mechanisms to deal with brute force attacks, and hopefully after a few thousand attempts it will permanently cease allowing further attempts.

Re:Nit-picking the article

[Wonko the Sane]

But your memory doesn't really work like that. If you actually understand extended characters then "character 255" is a single number when it comes to your memory, not three individual digits.

Re:Nit-picking the article

[GameboyRMH]

I think the CIA or foreign counterparts could help you with more ingenious solutions.

The CIA's favorite method is to slice up your dong with a razor and pour lime juice on the wounds...FYI.

Re:Nit-picking the article

[cenc]

What about password cracking in Asian languages? Do they have a special dictionary for Chinese passwords? How about all the "dead" or obscure langauges that do have methods for computer representation?

Everyone talks about English dictionary cracking, but what about other languages? Does anyone have any experience with doing this?

What do they do with Arabic passwords for instance?

Hey..

[lazylocomotives]

At least they didn't claim to use Wiis for that!

Re:Is this April 1st?

[spectralfreak]

Besides, this has already been done before with the research group that broke SSL certificates that used MD5 http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

A network of 20, at most

[davidwr]

ICE is hoping to buy 40 more original PS3s, through auction sites such as eBay.com, to add to the 20 it already has, Davenport said.

Assuming they have 1 or 2 in a testbed environment, we are probably talking 18 or 19 actively crunching numbers. Maybe 20 if the testbed machines also play ball.

Re:A network of 20, at most

[Cryacin]

25 if the boys aren't playing Halo in the back.

Re:A network of 20, at most

[larry bagina]

good luck playing halo on a ps3.

Re:A network of 20, at most

[__aasqbs9791]

We are talking about government workers here. ;^)

Re:A network of 20, at most

[Sebilrazen]

I think my funny bone is broken. I can't tell if this is funny because you're implying that government workers are in fact not working, or if you're implying that government workers have a version of Halo that plays on the PS3.

Re:A network of 20, at most

[__aasqbs9791]

Rather that they are trying to play an Xbox game on a PS3.

Re:A network of 20, at most

[tacarat]

Just make sure the modifications to the PS3 or Halo ensure the following:

Slow
Buggy
Costs more than the intended solution.
Makes an indecipherable, yet compelling, resume bullet.

It's a project worthy of the pointiest PHB to waste funds with.

And the problem with this is???

[LWATCDR]

Really what is the problem with this. These computers are being searched AFTER a judge issues a search warrant. In other words constitutional law is being followed to the letter in this case.
So what is the problem? Because it may involve child porn and you think that it is harmless? Well some of those computers have pictures of the victims "children" and the criminal act happening.
There is nothing wrong with this legally.
And having a fit about it is a clear case of calling wolf.
I am sure this will be used in any investigation that involves a computer and not just for child porn.
Complaining about the legal search of a computer after a warrant is issued is just stupid.

BTW I am sure that the NSA has much better systems based on FPGAs and Cell chips for breaking encryption than PS-3s but we will never hear about those and that type of wiretap without a warrant is what I am worried about.

Re:And the problem with this is???

[EmagGeek]

Okay, say I see you walking through an airport terminal with a laptop. Having no other evidence, what do I have that rises to the level of Probable Cause to obtain a warrant to confiscate your laptop and search it?

Re:And the problem with this is???

[Hatta]

Who said there was a problem?

Re:And the problem with this is???

[commodore64_love]

>>>There is nothing wrong with this legally.

Nope. Searches performed with the permission of a judge (warrant) are perfectly legal. ----- That's fine. It's the law that needs to be changed. IMHO there should actually be three stages - childhood, teenager, and adulthood. Then we'd no longer have the nonsense of teenaged boy/girlfriends being charged for "child porn" simply because they took photos of their own bodies. (For that matter nudity shouldn't even be illegal, regardless of age.)

>>>wiretap without a warrant is what I am worried about.

Agreed, As Judge Napolitano keeps repeating, the Patriot Act gives federal cops the ability to write their own warrants, without need to stand before a judge and swear an oath. That's just plain ridiculous.

Re:And the problem with this is???

[mkaushik]

Really what is the problem with this

The problem is that a tool is being used weirdly. Is a PS3 really a more powerful parallel computer per dollar than the various cards from Nvidia and ATI? Maybe it is, but if it is, then I have a gripe against Nvidia and ATI.

It is not. Plus with CUDA, there is much more scope for expandability with new GPUs coming to the market every so often. Why did they use PS3s?

Re:And the problem with this is???

[stephanruby]

If someone was really being suspected of doing child porn or viewing child porn, shouldn't this be under some other Federal agency's purview? Personally, the cynic in me believes they're doing this through the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency precisely because Immigration and Customs is a special case and they can probably bend the rules of the constitution a little through that agency (just like they did, when they arrested the ACLU guy and tried to enforce the IRS regulations on him under the guise of passenger safety/counter terrorism).

Re:And the problem with this is???

[shrtcircuit]

Depends. If your walking through the airport involves border transit, NO probable cause is needed - they can confiscate your laptop at any time, and retain it for up to 24 hours without warrant or cause, during which time a bit-for-bit copy of your drive is likely to be taken. With the quantity of overseas travelers it isn't super common, but enough of a concern that I took a virgin laptop with anything useful stored in AES-256 sparse volumes when going across the pond, or left the files back home which I could get to via internal VPN (some larger files needed to be taken with just due to time required to pull them over a long-distance WAN link).

Re:And the problem with this is???

[CronoCloud]

It is, at least for certain kinds of work. Remember that Folding@home broke the petaflop barrier because of the PS3's contributions. While the GPU's are powerful, they don't have the versatility i nthe kinds of work units they can handle as the PS3 can.

Re:And the problem with this is???

[LWATCDR]

I suggest that you look at the many posts full of fear and worry about big brother.

they'll need more... a lot more

[v_1_r_u_5]

assuming a perp uses a password from a set of 26 letters to choose from, it will take roughly two minutes to brute-force an 8-letter or fewer password with 40 Ps3's. (26^8 + 26^7 + ...) / (40 * 4 * 10^7). wow, that's great! but....

assuming a set of approximately 90 characters to choose from, it will take approximately a month :(

Re:they'll need more... a lot more

[ledow]

Assuming you can brute force it that easily and not, say, have to deal with any CPU intensive encryption/decryption process for each password. And that he only used 8 characters.

Re:they'll need more... a lot more

[ledow]

"4 million passwords per second" is, as has been established, bullshit for anything other than plaintext "is this the password" checking. Any sort of encryption will kill that rate down to a more sensible number (and multiply up the time taken) because decrypting, even with a known password, is dependent on the encryption scheme used and can run into hundreds or thousands of individual instructions.

And that's assuming that there *is* a simple check that will say "Yes, this is the right password." Guessing a password and checking against a known MD5 hash is a LOT different to checking whether you've successfully decrypted an encrypted file with unknown contents. If the source was an EXE, then you could decrypt with a password, look for "MZ" signature, etc. If it's a zip, or a jpeg, or a disk image, or any other of the several hundred plausible filetypes, then you've just multiplied your decryption time - by several factors. Now not only do you have to generate "the next random password", you have to perform heavy decryption operations to get out the decrypted texts and analyse a tiny portion of the encrypted file before that particular thread can move on to another password.

And then multiply that by the "longer password" factor and you start hitting stupidly impractical time really, really quickly. The point was to highlight that even "months" of decryption time is an ideal scenario with factors working in your favour (e.g. known plaintext to know when you've successfully decrypted). Without that, you really, really start adding time on quite fast. And, in fact, anyone even *bothering* with encryption to avoid incrimination is really going to have done it properly, or they'd be caught out by other traces.

Encryption is still in use for a reason - that one entity with even several thousand processors which are ideal for decrypting things would still take *decades* to decrypt even a simple message.

Re:they'll need more... a lot more

[CronoCloud]

That's not correct, older model PS3's including my CECHE01 model can still install and boot into Linux with the newest firmware. Only the Slim PS3's lack the ability. In other words, new firmware doesn't take away the ability in PS3's that had it.

Re:they'll need more... a lot more

[mrsteveman1]

One of the most popular encryption packages, Truecrypt, has a known offset in the volume where a specific word is stored, encrypted. I think it's the string 'true' or 'yes' or something.

Checking for that word tells the program when it has hit the right combination of password, key and cipher chain, and consequently it would also tell an attacker when they hit the right password in this case.

Re:they'll need more... a lot more

[GameboyRMH]

I was searching for that earlier but couldn't find anything on it. I wonder why TrueCrypt doesn't offer the option of NOT storing that string. It would at least slow down brute force attacks as the file system would have to be run through some sort of heuristic analysis to see if anything meaningful is there after each attempt.

Linux supported for PS3

[SuperKendall]

Linux was supported on PS3 before the latest model, they could be using the older units...

Or it's quite possible they simply wrote the needed drivers to work with the updated PS3 units.

Neither is cracking the console nor against the law.

Re:Linux supported for PS3

[tlhIngan]

Linux was supported on PS3 before the latest model, they could be using the older units...

Or it's quite possible they simply wrote the needed drivers to work with the updated PS3 units.

Neither is cracking the console nor against the law.

FTFA:

ICE is hoping to buy 40 more original PS3s, through auction sites such as eBay.com, to add to the 20 it already has, Davenport said.

They're buying the old PS3s. The $300 figure comes from the fact that you can get a PS3 for $300, but they aren't necessarily buying sub-$300 units. OTOH, I wonder why they don't just clean out GameStop/EBGames?

SO they're running Linux legally. Would be fun if they could force Sony to re-add "Other OS" support to the new PS3 slims.

Re:Linux supported for PS3

[fulldecent]

>> Linux was supported on PS3 before the latest model, they could be using the older units...
>> Or it's quite possible they simply wrote the needed drivers to work with the updated PS3 units.
>> Neither is cracking the console nor against the law.

It's only illegal if Sony, or Apple, or *AA says it's illegal.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[RAMMS EIN]

The PS3 _is_ very powerful, and I think somebody just realized how to make good use of that power.

Yeah right

[JavaBear]

" Naturally this is only being used to break encryption on computers seized with a warrant and suspected of harboring child pornography."

You know, if you buy that one, I have this little red bridge I'd like to sell you.

Re:Yeah right

[iammani]

Can it break passwords too?

Re:Is this April 1st?

[RAMMS EIN]

Wait, Sony released versions of the PS3 that _don't_ allow you to install Linux? Why am I only hearing about this now?

It's fun to laugh but on a serious note

[davidwr]

I knew a guy once who worked closely with anti-kiddie-porn cops. They rotated those guys off fairly quickly so they wouldn't go insane. What you see on Law & Order with the same cops doing the kiddie-smut patrol year in and year out may work for Munch and Stabler but it doesn't work in the real world.

Also, in the real world I'll be a cop's donut you don't get to do that kind of work in a decent-sized department unless you are emotionally stable, in a stable romantic relationship with another adult or had one in your past for a long time, and have a history of not getting irrational and emotional at the sight of disturbing visuals, while at the same time not being stone-cold about it either.

Re:It's fun to laugh but on a serious note

[jack2000]

These hard-ass, linebacker-shaped ex-Military Policeman sound very meek, while i haven't seen any cp i've seen plenty of guro in my days. It's not that disturbing. Are you telling me a single 4chan neckbeard could bring a police officer to tears and break his psyche?

Re:It's fun to laugh but on a serious note

[jadin]

What you see on Law & Order with the same cops doing the kiddie-smut patrol year in and year out may work for Munch and Stabler but it doesn't work in the real world.

I'm up to season 3 of SVU, and one thing they've made very clear is the stress and how quickly they get rotated out. So far they are keeping that pretty realistic. The main characters on the show are exceptions presumably because they are popular with viewers, not because they are so great at keeping their sanity.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[Monkeedude1212]

If you're the RPG type, I played Demon Souls the other week and it was breathtakingly fantastic, arguably better than Dragon Age in some respects.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[fm6]

Outside of lame Slashdot jokes, Soviet Russia hasn't existed since 1991. Elcomsoft is in the Russian Federation.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[CannonballHead]

In Soviet Russia, they have beeing doing it for some time now.

Slashdot Meme Parse Error at line 1: "they have beeing doing it for some time now" not recognized.

Let this be a lesson to you

[CSFFlame]

Use long passwords for encryption (minimum 10 chars, preferably 20). Use upper-case, lower-case, numbers, and symbols. Do NOT use the password anywhere else or write it down. Sorry, but you're going to have to commit it to memory. Do not use windows built in encryption or any retail encryption schemes. Use open source. Truecrypt is not open source, but people use it anyway, so read up first before you decide.

Re:Let this be a lesson to you

[G00F]

The source code is available. What more would a user need to know that the data is secure?

Besides, they allow you to use source code, and the source still needs to be made available for derivative products. Is it because you can't use the name true crypt if you make changes?

wow, picky picky.

Re:Let this be a lesson to you

[al0ha]

What I think you mean is that one should not use any encryption algorithm or package which is not open for peer review. That is true, but however that is not the case for TrueCrypt. The code and algorithms are completely open for peer review, thus it is far better than any closed source option and I for one say you should use it. So what if it is technically not distributed under an OpenSource license? All that means is you can't personally give it away, you must point any prospective users to the package. As for commercial considerations, they must license it; so what is wrong with that?

Re:Let this be a lesson to you

[hmar]

I think the issue people have against Truecrypt isn't the philisophical ideal of OSS, but that without an open source license there is no guarantee that the source will remain available. Considering that the source is floating around available, I don't really think this is much of a worry.

What is known

[AHuxley]

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5itMBF-kPRgoyoD97Y_DtvcyItGSQ
FARC data was opened after
"It took Interpol two weeks running 10 computers simultaneously 24 hours a day to break into the encrypted files, the agency said." in 2008.
C3 seems to be funded with extra millions so whats missing with this story?
Why buy toys? Toys have cheap bottlenecks as "Halo" at 620p showed.
Sony PR, a cry for funding and power ? Why this dependance on Sony suburban plastic?
If federal agents find more PS3's via forfeiture laws, this might allow a super grid of units?
Also shows how good MS and archive encryption is :)
Real world numbers:)

4 million passwords? Umm, no.

[B5_geek]

As we all most likely know, It would be impossible* to actually try 4 million passwords per second. I'd be willing to wager the actual headline should be:

"PS3s have been purchased to calculate 4 Million hash-table lookups per second."

Step 1: load hash table to RAM.
Step 2: let the brute force CPU bang away at it till it finds a match.

4MFLOPS seems much more likely.

They aren't cracking Encryption!

[rahvin112]

There is a difference between cracking encryption and the password used to secure the encryption. The article says they are using the systems to crack passwords, not encryption. The submitter has a reading problem.

concussion

[davidwr]

look up a bit

Diffrent approach.

[changa]

Ok, leave the data in the cloud and  travel with a laptop with a 100% blank drive and an os install disk to use when you get there.

Re:Diffrent approach.

[Interoperable]

That's your approach to transporting child pornography? Leave it on a privately owned, remote server that lawfully has to turn over data under a subpoena. That's more effective than drive encryption?

LOL

[davidwr]

If the smart crooks are using any version of Windows

ROTFLOL Oh you slay me with your humor and wit!!!

Re:Is this April 1st?

[virmaior]

Outside of lame Slashdot jokes, Soviet Russia hasn't existed since 1991. Elcomsoft is in the Russian Federation.

tell that to Georgia, the Ukraine, the Baltic States, and Poland.

Re: You need ciphersaber

[Joce640k]

http://ciphersaber.gurus.org/

PS3-slim

[mathfeel]

Is this why SONY introduced the slim? Some company scooping up a large number of PS3, on each Sony takes a loss on, for computation purpose with no intend of buying game?

They could have just asked Red Octane to release "Child Porn Encryption Hero".

If the perp isn't savvy

[beej]

If the perp's not crypto-savvy, this will work pretty well, I think. I use John The Ripper for password cracking the machine I admin, and it actually catches people from time to time. Once back in college (when computer people were friendly to this sort of thing) I wrote and ran a naive password cracker using /usr/dict/words--it caught an instructor with the password "sunshine". Most people, including most child pornography enthusiasts, will use shitty passwords.

If the perp uses 160 characters of plain English text, however, the PS3s are going to have their work cut out for them, cracking passwords in an average of 300 trillion years per.

I'm pretty sure the PS3s will be out of warranty by then, but the C3 will be able to run 37 quintillion full-speed PS3 emulators on the Dimension 37 Interuniversal Hadron Computer.

Re:This is important people, it's for CHILD PORN

[archont]

It is a well known FACT, sir, an undeniable FACT that is backed by experts, that TERRORISM is funded by child pornography and software piracy. While we all stand arm in arm, certain harmful and degenerate elements stand out here on slashdot, advocating for the molestation of innocent children, like yours or mine, or theft of the common daily bread from the fair and honest folks at Warner or Sony, all while fueling their sinister plots of murder and hatred.

All those elements need to know that the american people will not and never will turn a blind eye to the abuse of children or theft of intellectual property, and only those who have something to hide would choose to hide it! Therefor it is immediately obvious that decrypting the data is not required to convict the terrorist, but only to prove additional charges.

P.S. I'm not americanish, but I think I'm doing good?

Nvidia 8800GT PS3

[ymgve]

My 8800GT gets about 100 million passwords per second when cracking MD5 and SHA1 hashes. I thought the CELL was supposed to make the PS3 faster?

How does this work?

[AP31R0N]

Seems to me that a reasonably well designed OS would lock after 4 password attempts. How are they entering all these passwords w/o the system balking?

i'm asking because i don't know, please don't mod me a troll for not knowing something.

Re:How does this work?

[wilko11]

The exact method will vary depending on the OS and platform, but generally the first thing authorities will do is use a disk cloner to create an image for forensic purposes. Once they have the cloned image they can use a variety of techniques without modifying the original. This ensures that the original system can be re-cloned if the copy gets damaged. It also ensures that an original unaltered image is available to both sides in the event of a court case.

Re:How does this work?

[AP31R0N]

Thanks for replying.

Let's say it's an XP pro box with typical corporate settings, do you know what they'd do next? What keeps it from locking?

(i'm not expecting you personally to know, i'm hoping someone will see the conversation and hop in)

Re:How does this work?

[Bl4ckJ3sus]

Without encryption, it can be done with http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html/ which can be found on the ultimate boot CD as well. I've used it a few times to get into machines where users have forgotten their passwords. It will reset/eliminate the multi-attempt lockout. There's others out there as well that do the same thing.

Re:How does this work?

[cfalcon]

If the government wants into your data, they have a copy of the data (presumably because they lawfully confiscated it with a warrant). The last thing they are doing is asking *your OS to unlock itself*. If they are fortunate enough to grab your machine while it is ON and, say, the screen is locked, then they can just read the RAM directly after using the hotplug thing that lets them transport your still-running computer to the lab, from your wall. No need to decrypt anything if the key is in memory.

If instead your machine is deactivated and everything is off, they would run a program versus the actual data on the drive (or rather, on a COPY of the drive that they make). At no point would they run your OS, and obviously if you just have a bunch of data to try to crack, there's nothing to "lock"- the only code running is the cracking code, guessing solutions. However, I wouldn't think that brute force would actually crack any secure passwords ever.

Re:How does this work?

[appleguru]

For a typical operating system, it'd involve extracting the password hash from the target disk, and then running a program (like john) that takes text inputs (bruteforced or from a wordlist) and hashes them, and then compares the hashes and sees if they match. It is a bit more complicated than that (salts, etc), especially in a forensic environment where data integrity must be preserved, but that's the idea.

The methodology is similar for encrypted files/filesystems/etc, but it all relies on knowing how the authentication takes place so it can mimic it, quickly.

Re:How does this work?

[The -e**(i*pi)]

The OS stores a hash of the password on the hard drive.
When you log, in the OS calculates the hash of the password you typed and compares it to the one saved on the disk.

Re:How does this work?

[kelanden]

The investigators would mount the disk image on another system and attempt to crack the password hash. Government entities can be expected to have a good set of rainbow tables for whatever algorithm Windows uses.

Re:How does this work?

[AP31R0N]

Woah. +5 informative.

Re:How does this work?

[AsmCoder8088]

Neo, is that you?

Re:How does this work?

[AP31R0N]

Oh weird... deja vu. i just thought i had already replied to this post.

Re:How does this work?

[falconwolf]

Seems to me that a reasonably well designed OS would lock after 4 password attempts. How are they entering all these passwords w/o the system balking?

I thought the same at first, however if you copy or clone the disk then run the cracker program on the PS3 what can stop it? No program on the original computer is needed. I thought then that decrypters would need to know what algorithm was used to encrypt the data, but even here I don't really know if it's needed or not.

Falcon

Re:How does this work?

[fnj]

Oh, for heaven's sake. That attack is child's play to defeat. Use more than one level of nested encryption. Then they won't get past even the first level using your approach, because the output of the first level will NEVER "make sense."

Re:How does this work?

[SheeEttin]

Because they aren't asking the computer, "Hey, is this the password? No? Well, how about this?" They're taking the encryption algorithm and running possible passwords through it to see if the resulting hash matches the one it needs.
Or at least that's how some brute-force methods work. (It also assumes you have access to the hashing algorithm. If they don't, they probably have a special version of the program that doesn't do any locking out.) Oh, and sorry if anything is factually incorrect here, it's 3 AM and I should be sleeping.

I wonder if they're also using (or generating) rainbow tables. A couple PS3s and a whole lot of disk space is probably a lot cheaper than several PS3s working case-by-case.

Re:How does this work?

[Radtoo]

First realize this: It is still possible to make a copy of the whole thing that was encrypted. So, you could have a hundred copies of that OS running when you crack the password. It wouldn't matter much even if after four attempts the OS deleted the files that are relevant to getting access- there would still be copies.

However things are simpler, the OS itself isn't even required. An attacker usually can just copy the figurative lock on the box a lot of times and then let his horde of minions (PS3, in this case, since their cell cpu are better at this than other cpu) try to break that.

So if they used more PS3s they'd very likely be able to try as many more passwords.

Re:How does this work?

[selven]

It's an encryption algorithm they're breaking, not an OS. With an encryption algorithm you have the ciphertext and you're trying to find the key and the plaintext. There is no opportunity for the ciphertext owner to inject software that imposes those kinds of restrictions.

Re:How does this work?

[CodeBuster]

Obviously, they are not attempting to crack the passwords from within the system in question; they have made copies of the ciphertexts onto data storage controlled by them and accessible by the PS3s involved in the cracking effort.

Re:Oh, no, no, no, no, no...

[turing_m]

Well?

Re:Is this April 1st?

[somersault]

LittleBigPlanet.

When the PS3 came out there were loads of stories about the awesome powah of the Cell processor. They are great value for money if you want to do some number crunching. Just a shame you can't use the graphics processor as well (Sony blocked off GPU access from within Linux AFAIK) or they would really fly.

Hmmmm

[Idiomatick]

With the planned 60 PS3s assuming they brute force it and worst-case. It will take them:

At 8character passwords w/ letters and numbers only, 3.3hours.
Upper and lower case increase that figure to 10.5days. (With 9 characters 7.15years)
84character set brings us up to 119.5days.
Note: I just used x^8 which isn't totally accurate, the numbers in reality are a bit larger but it doesn't matter much.

This makes me wonder in case this is true. We are running up to a physical limitation in the human brain. People already have trouble memorizing the dozens of 8character passwords. 9 characters will hold moores law off for a few more years (not the precise meaning of moores law but you know what i mean). The problem is also that people are getting more accounts for things. Most people even today use the same passwords for a variety of things. I'd say almost all people.

So I ask the /. crowd are there any good alternatives to passwords that are feasible? Something secure. Something that can be implemented on websites. What do you think we should be working towards? Is there already something in place that you can give an example of?

Re:Hmmmm

[icebraining]

OpenID?

Re:Hmmmm

[mrsteveman1]

2 factor auth, maybe even 3.

Every seen those little RSA keys that generate random time-sensitive numbers? I think Paypal might be using something similar. The password is standing out alone at the moment for most use cases, and it doesn't need to be.

Re:Hmmmm

[sanosuke001]

I would like to see all online sites adopt a universally used password system using those number-changing RSA key dongles. However, the only ones I've seen are 6-8 numbers; just pick one and try over and over and you'll get it eventually. They need to design one with 10+ using the alphanumeric, upper and lowercase, with punctuation dongle. That way, you could have one dongle for all your online accounts.

Unfortunately, one company (or the government) would have to run it and a single point of failure is never a good thing. Though, it could be done.

Re:Hmmmm

[LearnToSpell]

Well, the way they work (I use one daily) is that you have a combination password with it, so you have to enter your password AND the RSA dongle number. If Joe Badguy knows your password, he still needs the dongle, or vice versa, and there's one login attempt per minute allowed (at least on our server).

Re:Hmmmm

[peater]

You can even find MD5 dictionaries online which have precomputed hashes. You can just search for the one you need and it will give you the reverse MD5. I would assume authorities already have tables of precomputed MD5 hashes which reduces cracking time significantly.

Re:Hmmmm

[cortesoft]

There is a difference between a normal password and a password used for encryption. For example, a password to log in to a website does not need to be able to handle 4 million guesses a second.... it will be rate limited by the website way before that happens.

You only need to choose a large random password for encryption that you need to be able to handle a local access attack..... like hard drive encryption... so you most likely only need one. so it is probably something you don't have to type in very often..... and you can choose something you never change, as a local disk attack is unlikely to occur without you realizing it, at which point you can know to change your password to something new and very long.

Re:Hmmmm

[hacker]

"For example, a password to log in to a website does not need to be able to handle 4 million guesses a second.... it will be rate limited by the website way before that happens."

You're making a HUGE mistake, if you believe that assumption. With a warrant (or enough pressure without a warrant), the federal government will have direct access to the backend storage that the website uses, and just brute-force the password offline.

That assume of course, that the website itself is using sufficiently strong encryption and not just using ROT13 on the server-side.

Your website logins should be more secure than those you use on your local system, because more people could potentially have access to it. It also validates the need to never reuse a password anywhere you use on the web, ever. Anywhere.

Re:Hmmmm

[CodeBuster]

It is actually not too difficult to remember longer passwords. You already remember multiple 8 character passwords, right? If you can do that then you can create longer passwords by combining them. For example, I have 32 character sequences (not English words and including numbers and symbols) that I have committed to memory and use on a regular basis when I require enhanced security.

Re:Hmmmm

[Rich0]

I suspect that if we really want to be secure than the dongle is the only way to go.

For website login something similar to RSA SecurID would work. Better still, give the dongle some way to communicate bidirectionally (USB for web, speaker/mic/modem for phone), and then it can do an RSA challenge/response. The private key never leaves the dongle, EVER.

For encryption you can again use a dongle. In this case you probably need to have the session key leave the dongle since otherwise you need a high-speed link and the dongle has to stay attached to the computer.

The dongle has a keypad/display, and requires the input of a PIN to work. The dongle of course is built to resist hardware-level attacks (SEMs/etc). Upon input of an owner-designated fake PIN, the dongle wipes its memory.

The limiting factors with this approach are:

1. Hardware resistance of the dongle. It has to be VERY resistant to being taken apart without destruction of the keys.
2. For encryption, the implementation on the host PC is important since it will see the session key. It is critical that it never be written to disk or otherwise leak.
3. If a PC is captured in a powered on state it might be possible to break in with the encryption key still in RAM, or to use hardware-level attacks on the PC to retrieve the contents of RAM.
4. Other hardware-level attacks against a host PC are possible, such as tapping various busses/etc.

Weaknesses #2-4 only apply to use for encryption by the host. Encryption performed by the dongle, and authentication have only weakness #1, since the key doesn't leave the device. The application being provided with the authentication could of course have other weaknesses (replay attacks, etc), but those aren't inherent to this design.

Re:Hmmmm

[Idiomatick]

I use the cloud for my todo list... and google for retrieval.

Idio67302chores:11/19/2009: pick up mom downtown Thursday.

Re:Hmmmm

[Idiomatick]

Average cracking time is a fraction of what bruteforce worst-case is. The average password isn't that secure. I remember with popular password lists you could get into many (30%) accounts in the first million guesses. Then you move to mutated dictionary attacks and that will get almost all of them in a few billion guesses. So it really is a lot less.

Re:Hmmmm

[Idiomatick]

"You already remember multiple 8 character passwords, right?"
Nope but i have a medical condition so I'm not sure how fair that is :P Having one long key that you use parts of for various sites is actually pretty cool. Insecure if a person is after you but offers a lot of protection vs bots which is the main concern anyways (99.9999%).

Re:Hmmmm

[IndustrialComplex]

I've taken to forgetting the letters completely and relying more on keyboard patterns. I'd think of some musical theme and 'play' it on my keyboard. I'd practice the pattern a few times and eventually I'd have a password that doesn't exist in any dictionary (it might, but I wouldn't know it).

I liked it because I remembered them through muscle memory and didn't have to think, 'Was that letter caPitolized or thiS one?' I just knew the pattern.

The drawbacks I faced were this:

1. Ergonomic keyboards (The extreme ones) would throw off my pattern since I didn't always stick with resting my hands on the home row of keys to start.

2. password rules messed me up when they required a specific amount of special characters rather than just requiring a length. When you actually do have a random password, sometimes you don't always include those special characters.

3. Recalling my password without a keyboard in front of me. For example, some banks ask you to 'click' in your password using a mouse. Since I didn't know the content of my password, and just the pattern, I couldn't ever remember it to click it in.

Re:Hmmmm

[cstdenis]

The website (ie, most websites) probably doesn't even encrypt the data or even your password. Password strength isn't a serious issue there, if a government gets involved, the data will be theirs.

Re:Hmmmm

[ediron2]

So I ask the /. crowd are there any good alternatives to passwords that are feasible?

Yes.

Something secure. Something that can be implemented on websites. What do you think we should be working towards?

Yes.

Is there already something in place that you can give an example of?

Yes.

This gets covered twice a month or more on /., plus countless trade and general-interest articles... Do you really expect us to drag your sorry ass up the hill teaching you security 101 when you've apparently been intentionally blase and ignorant until this very moment? Grab a clue, grab a book on security, or google up password security. Learn about the three factors that can be used to create 2-factor sets, learn about signatures and authority. Or, at the least, read anything you find on advice for creating better passwords. Pass phrases, for starters. Follow that advice and shoot for a mix of letters, numbers and symbols/gibberish characters that is more than 15 characters long. Have a plan to cope with forgetfulness (in other words, write the passwords on a piece of paper you keep in sock drawer or somewhere else private)... aw, shit, and suddenly I am sucked into this copypasta-smelling idiotic request for obvious information.

Better yet, give everything to charity and then nobody'll want your freakin' passwords.

Re:Hmmmm

[Idiomatick]

I said alternative to passwords... Something that you rarely see outside of ssh and the likes.

Ron Paul

[BitHive]

Good thing the government is inept and everything they do is an unmitigated failure!

Sony is protecting consumers!!

[tnmc]

This must be why the 3rd party OS option was removed from the Playstation Slim! SONY *loves* them some customers! {cough}

Re:Is this April 1st?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you failed to read /. religously: http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/09/02/1645213/Game-Over-For-Sony-and-Open-Source

The cell

[WarJolt]

It amazes me with things like the IBM QS21 and the mercury blade servers that the cheapest solution is to get a piece of hardware like the ps3 with so many extra components not needed for number crunching.

The cell was designed for floating point calculations. Cracking requires a lot of integer calculations. You won't get the benefits that science and graphic applications get like folding@home.

Re:The cell

[Anonymous Coward]

The Cell can issue integer operations at the same rate as single precision FP, and the integer pipelines are shorter. The integer throughput is as good or better than the floating point.

Re:And Sony's thoughts?

[mister_playboy]

Even with subsidies, Isn't there a more cost effective Cell solution?

No... IBM Cell blades are basically the only other choice, and they are a wee bit expensive.

Re:Nvidia 8800GT PS3

[Lord_Jeremy]

My 8800GT gets about 100 million passwords per second when cracking MD5 and SHA1 hashes. I thought the CELL was supposed to make the PS3 faster?

[Citation Needed]

Sorry to be an ass but that sounds a little outlandish...

This only works on poor passwords

[Khopesh]

I've done a lot of password-cracking math, even toyed with the idea of writing an academic paper on it. Generally, I work on the (generous) assumption that a well-groomed single node can chunk through 100k passwords per second and that things scale perfectly, so 20 nodes would work through 2M passwords per second. They're claiming their 20-node cluster can handle twice that, and I fully believe it. Powerful GPUs are known to perform extremely well on password cracking, and PS3s certainly have them. That's twice the performance for half to a fifth the cost. Nice, but not "OMG."

They plan to scale up to 60 nodes, which is 12M pass/s. To break a 8-character monospace password (37 bits of complexity, which is pretty weak), it would take just under five hours ( 26^8/(12*10^6) /60/60 ). However, to break an 8-character alphanumeric password (case and numbers), that becomes seven months ( (26+26+10)^8/(12*10^6) /60/60/24/365*12 ).

This is only scary when you have a super-intelligent dictionary attack. Scrape the hard drive and any subpoenaed documents for words and add that to a dictionary of common password parts, then perform your dictionary attack -- dreadfully powerful. To avoid falling victim to this, a good rule of thumb is that words are awesome to use, and they're more secure, but they're only about as secure as two random characters (three with a rich vocabulary including 3 or more of: arcane words, uncommon foreign words, uncommon misspelled words, uncommon proper nouns, l33t-speak ...). So that 13-char "secure password" you use that looks like metropolitan8 effectively only has three or four characters to a dictionary attacker, and that clever 14-char password of spageti4dinner has only five or six, depending on how good the attacker's dictionary is at misspelled words. A tip: put punctuation inside your words to break them up (without forming words), e.g. metr[opo;%litan8, and you've pretty much defeated the dictionary attack.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[jack2000]

Two words: Rainbow tables.
That and some dictionary magic.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[MikeBabcock]

Of course, nearly random passwords generated from /dev/random are really hard to memorize :)

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[technomanceraus]

I'd say they'd be using the SPU's rather than the video card (RSX) or maybe they're utilizing both if they're smart

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[bertok]

However, to break an 8-character alphanumeric password (case and numbers), that becomes seven months

Ah... theory!

In practice, even very long passwords are trivially cracked in little time, using simple methods.

Unfortunately, I lost the source, but while studying cryptography myself, I stumbled upon a quote from some guy involved in government decryption in the US, and (paraphrasing), he said that their technique was basically to pick up the hard disk from the machine with the protected content, and then simply try every consecutive range of bytes as a password.

Unless the disk was encrypted with 'whole disk encryption', it works something like 90% of the time, simply because of stupid software saving plain-text passwords, users reusing passwords for various purposes, things like hibernation and page files, etc... I suspect that on disks from corporate networks, it would work even better, because if any one disk reveals the network admin password, you can unlock everything else from there.

So if you have a 100 GB disk, and you try all byte ranges from 4 to 20 bytes long (to account for various password lengths), and you try every byte range as both an ASCII and UTF-16 string, that's merely 17x2x100*10^9 = 3400 billion passwords to try, or 3.2 days at your quoted "12 million passwords per second".

In practice, most disks would crack much faster than that, if you aim the algorithm at the most likely sources first, such as the page and hibernation files, the user registry, and the web browser cache and configuration folders.

The lesson I took away from that is that against an attacker with physical access, it really doesn't make the slightest difference how strong your password is, unless the entire disk is encrypted.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[mindstrm]

The significant point is really just the cost savings - the PS3 is subsidized by game sales, so if you are buying it for raw computing power, it's a good deal cheaper than anything else.

Good encryption practices can make this type of thing useless - but, having had to reverse engineer passwords on all kinds of systems before, a *lot* of people don't follow best practices.

It's natural for a computer crimes division to have a cluster to crack passwords, and good of them to be open minded enough to seek slightly weird ways to leverage technology to do it.

Nothing groundbreaking though, for sure. The giant arrays of god-knows-what the NSA likely has likely make this look like a grain of sand on a beach the size of the moon.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[Mike610544]

This is only scary when you have a super-intelligent dictionary attack. Scrape the hard drive and any subpoenaed documents for words and add that to a dictionary of common password parts, then perform your dictionary attack -- dreadfully powerful.

If this much effort makes sense for words, does anyone ever consider keyboard layout passwords? Something like !@#$5678QWERtyui is easy to type/remember. I haven't seen any mention of that being a strategy in password cracking.

Also, if any of the people designing the "password strength rules" are reading this, can we do away with the systems where Blink182! is considered a strong password because it has upper/lower case and punctuation?

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[npsimons]

How about =jvZ|3J(B!+Zmu#^B~:I as a password? That's not one of my current passwords, but most of mine are like that.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[registrar]

My password creation method is to thump on the keyboard a bit and try to find a string of characters that vaguely tell a story. For example, "#", could refer to weed. The letter "u" might mean "you" hence "uIS5#" might mean "you smoke dope 5 times" or something equally pointless. I also select passwords that shortish (10 chars), are vaguely easy to type.

The space of such passwords must be pretty large... but I still wonder how much those criteria shrink the options. E.g. I would probably not think of a story for kek6<5zahg, or find it easy to type... There must be lots of identifiable patterns in "what is easy to type".

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[johncandale]

I. Powerful GPUs are known to perform extremely well on password cracking, and PS3s certainly have them.

Just a note, the PS3s GPU isn't so powerful, based off the nvidia G70 and was, rumor has it, tacked on late in hardware development. The 8 Cell powerpc cpu core's with one dedicated to aspects of the OS and security, and one is a spare to improve production yields. Leaving 6, is where the ps3 gets the bulk of it's processing power.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[solosaint]

This is what I dont understand about the article... Do they crack these passwords WITHOUT a dictionary? say you used the password NGeDPdkpUgzrCu would this be cracked using their awesome computing power?

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[Per Wigren]

My full-disk encrypted Linux-ISO-serving file server uses LUKS with a key stored on a USB stick I keep off-site (but easily accessible when needed).
On boot, it tries to mount the USB stick by its ext2 label and then use the content of /key.txt as password.
The key.txt file is a salted SHA512 hash of a specific revision of a specific file in the CVS repository of a semi-popular OSS project so I CAN recreate it if the USB stick breaks. I only have to remember the salt and which file and revision to use. If it gets stolen I can just change the key to another one (LUKS supports this).
Since it's a headless server it's much easier to boot than if I had to type in a password.
I reboot the server very seldom and reboots are about always planned so it's not a problem that I have to walk a couple of minutes to get it every second month or so.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[Narishma]

Not to mention that the article says they use the PS3 because they can install Linux on it, but you can't access the GPU from Linux anyway.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[citizenr]

Powerful GPUs are known to perform extremely well on password cracking, and PS3s certainly have them.

Geforce 7800 is not "powerful"

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[a_resnikoff]

Depending on the encryption there is another simpler option. Simply precompute the password hashes, and stored them in a database; a.k.a. the "Rainbow tables". Then instead of a calculation you perform a SELECT statment on a database and in under a second you have the password you need. If you're willing to give up a TB of hard drive space you're going to be able to crack (quote from memory, apologies for any inaccuracy) all 14 and below character passwords in zero time.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[Tarsir]

Ah... theory!

In practice, even very long passwords are trivially cracked in little time, using simple methods.

Unfortunately, I lost the source, but while studying cryptography myself, I stumbled upon a quote from some guy involved in government decryption in the US, and (paraphrasing), he said that their technique was basically to pick up the hard disk from the machine with the protected content, and then simply try every consecutive range of bytes as a password.

How did this get modded insightful instead of the redundant it so rightly deserves? From the third paragraph of the GPt:

Scrape the hard drive and any subpoenaed documents for words and add that to a dictionary of common password parts, then perform your dictionary attack -- dreadfully powerful.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[CodeBuster]

Unless the disk was encrypted with 'whole disk encryption'

That may become a foregone conclusion, considering that high quality whole disk encryption tools are freely available to anyone who wants to use them.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[Bert64]

There are already pre-made dictionaries containing common passwords like that, for different layouts of keyboard too.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[Bert64]

You can use control chars in passwords too, but depending how you log in you might not be able to enter them...
I used to add an alt-tab char to the password on linux boxes, it makes it impossible for windows users to log in.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[Bobb Sledd]

Good luck cracking mine then!

My password is approximately 32 bytes long, uses alpha numerics, and also uses two keyfiles, and encrypts with AES+DES+Blowfish. And I don't use that password anywhere except my encrypted "media" collection, and I also have a "shadow volume" in case the encrypted volume is discovered (for plausible deniability).

So there!

Or I could be lying. You'll never know.

At any rate, I think it would be easier to trick me into installing a keylogger/mouselogger (or break into my house and install it without my knowledge) and capture what I type in and click on to discover how to unencrypt it.

Or, wait for me to leave the encrypted volume mounted, and copy some part of the media that you know exists in the encrypted volume, and decrypt everything else based on that.

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[wdef]

Yep. No recognizable words in any common language and a character space including alphanumeric, punctuation and weird chars - plus say the perp uses 30 characters in the passphrase .... And then they have no way of knowing what char types the passphrase might span, other than a guess, so they'd have to assume the worst for brute force. How many lifetimes of the present universe did you say they've got to crack that thing?

Re:This only works on poor passwords

[OlivierB]

The reality is that cracking word passed passwords is even simpler than what you are pointing to, even in cases where special punctuation has been used mid word. No need for crazy wizardry, simple Markov chains technique tell you that there is a probability of using a given character after another. You just need to work your way through the decision tree in descending order with some algorithm. For instance, In English language there is a y% probability that a "n" character follows a "e" character etc. If you know which languages are spoken by the person who chose the password you can already zoom in very quickly

This is silly

[Lord_Jeremy]

Seriously, this whole article sounds like a load of horsebull. As far as I know, things like RSA and AES use integer math for the encryption and decryption schemes. It therefore doesn't make much sense to use a product designed for large numbers of floating point operations, as I would imagine the PS3 is. I'm actually pretty curious how many GMIPS the PS3 can perform. In any case, why would they pay for a device that contains all sorts of hardware ancillary to the core processing task. For instance, any gaming system is going to have a fairly powerful GPU, as well as extraneous RAM and sound hardware, etc. Also, in terms of the 4 million passwords or keys or whatever per second, I just wrote a very minimalist C program to try cracking passwords on an encrypted disk image I just created and it was definitely not reaching 4 million tries a second on my Core 2 Quad...

Re:This is silly

[aXis100]

Maybe because with Sony subsidising the cost of the consoles, $300 is a steal! It doesn't matter if there is an unnecesary graphics card or not, it is a bargain for a serious multiprocessing computer.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[theaveng]

(Score:0, Troll)

      How ironic that the U.S. Cyber Crime unit is breaking U.S. Law to accomplish their goal (modding the hardware and installing Linux). Hmmm. But I doubt Sony or anybody else will file suit. They don't want to go after a big target like the United States government.

How is this in any way a troll?

Re:Is this April 1st?

[fm6]

You're saying that because they're still bullies, they're still the Soviet Union? Little things like abandoning socialism don't count?

Re:Is this April 1st?

[GrumblyStuff]

New Slashdot meme creating a buzz? Tonight at 11.

No longer possible with the PS3 Slim...

[PinchDuck]

which is too bad. You can no longer install linux on it. I keep hoping (against hope) that Sony will release the full SDK and really allow people to use the power of the Cell. Throw us hobbyists some love, Sony. Tell us what we gotta do.

Riiiight....

[Stanislav_J]

Naturally this is only being used to break encryption on computers seized with a warrant and suspected of harboring child pornography.

Naturally. (*wink-wink* *nudge-nudge* say no more...)

Re:Riiiight....

[astat]

I should try and be the third person to quote this part of the article with some sarcastic comment, just to see if I too will get maximum positive modding..

Re:Riiiight....

[2obvious4u]

Had you done so in your comment I would have been happy to oblige.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[c6gunner]

You're saying that because they're still bullies, they're still the Soviet Union? Little things like abandoning socialism don't count?

North Korea is still the Democratic People's Republic of Korea ... and they've abandoned democracy, a republic, and their people ...

Re:Is this April 1st?

[Megane]

How is this in any way a troll?

Because nowhere in TFA did it say that they were modding the hardware? Fat PS3s are built to allow you to install Linux, though they do deny you GPU access.

Re:Big bad lawyers fron Sony

[CronoCloud]

Installing Linux is a Sony supported function on the PS2 (fat model) and the PS3 (fat model), no hacks/mods needed.

passwords get expensive fast

[SuperBanana]

(Brute-forcing keys is fairly foolish with modern encryption systems, but brute-forcing passwords isn't.)

Only if the person who created the password used lowercase letters, and kept it under 7-8 characters. Around 8 characters, things get expensive VERY fast.

Example: 6 mixed case, numbers, plus punctuation marks (only those on number keys): 140BN combinations, which would take 9.6 hours.

Not very good, right? Well, make it 8 characters, and they're looking at roughly 722 TRILLION combinations, or about 5.7 YEARS (provided I didn't make any power-of-ten mistakes.)

Re:passwords get expensive fast

[blueg3]

For completely-random yes. However, a disturbing number of passwords are combinations of dictionary words. They're also often written down or stored in unsafe places in memory. Of course, you wouldn't know *where* they're stored on disk, so you run "strings" against the entire disk and use that as an input list for your cracker (note that the output of strings on a full disk is small compared to the number of random 8-character passwords).

Re:Is this April 1st?

[theaveng]

Oh okay. I did not realize people are "trolls" for not knowing information about obscure console "fat" versus "slim" variants, and which ones can or can not use Linux without hacking.

Ignorance is punished on slashdot

TrueCrypt

[falconwolf]

While TrueCrypt encrypts what makes it real good is it hides files.

Falcon

Re:Obama fails again...

[ppanon]

It's pretty simple. The military courts are appropriate for combatants captured on a foreign field of battle. By trying KSM and the others in civilian courts (because the 9/11 victims were civilians on US soil), the case establishes a couple of things that neo-cons don't want to happen:

a) since evidence obtained through torture is ineligible in civilian courts, the information used by the prosecution will be what was obtained before he was tortured. So when KSM gets convicted on the basis of all the incriminating information that was available prior to torture, it will be a strong indictment that the torture used on him was not necessary. The whole neo-con "we had to torture" argument is shown for the pack of lies it is. Since Cheney was the biggest proponent of torture, it's not surprising he's also the most opposed to this happening since a conviction changes his place in history from question mark to a sadistic torturer.

b) it re-establishes the primacy of the standard US criminal justice system for acts committed on U.S. soil.

Basically, if KSM and his buddies can be convicted and put in jail through the civilian courts, it means that the wholesale raping of the Geneva Convention, habeus corpus, and other civil rights by the (neo-con) Republicans was unnecessary. It also sets a strong counter-precedent in case the neo-cons (inevitably) try the whole "Permanent Emergency" gambit again.

So yeah, the neo-cons and their water bearers like Lieberman are seriously against this and using FUD to slam the effort. Big surprise.

actually...

[sawka]

actually they're using the ps3's to play rock band and gta 4. but the higher ups wouldn't let the purchase order through without a more official sounding reason...

A tip:

[falconwolf]

put punctuation inside your words to break them up (without forming words), e.g. metr[opo;%litan8, and you've pretty much defeated the dictionary attack.

I tried that once and was told I could not use a punctuation mark. I mix alphanumeric characters though.

Re:A tip:

[Inda]

And every password cracking program I've used gives the option to replace letters with symbols.

1,i,l,|,...

It is trivial.

Re:A tip:

[MobyDisk]

Of course it is trivial. The point is that it now has more combinations to try.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[MikeBabcock]

Way to troll, but I'll bite.

First, have a look at Folding @Home on the PS3 for some numbers on its computational abilities.

Now, have a quick glance at the exlusives, some of which are simply incredible games. If you want to believe the hype though, just ignore it and miss out.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[MikeBabcock]

It was part of the changes made to lower costs on the new slim PS3s.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[fm6]

What are you saying? That Russia is still "socialist" even though they dropped the word from their title? Recall that this thread started with a link to a private business in Russia, something that would have been plain illegal under the old rules.

I'm not saying that Russia is suddenly a free democratic place. But they're obviously not the same entity as the one that dissolved back in 1991.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[c6gunner]

What are you saying? That Russia is still "socialist" even though they dropped the word from their title?

I must admit that I'm more than a little awed by your skill at getting everything back-assward.

Russia was never socialist to begin with. Socialism is an ideology which they hid behind in order to suppress dissent and criticism. Calling Russia socialist is just as silly as calling North Korea a "Democratic People's Republic".

On the other hand, there's no reason to avoid the name just because they've finally given up their pretenses. I think it serves as a useful reminder. If you wanted to drop the "Soviet" from the name in order to make a political statement, the right time to do that would have been while they were still misusing it.

Re:4 million passwords? Umm, no.

[ceoyoyo]

"4MFLOPS seems much more likely."

For a PS1 maybe.

What they really are being used for

[Conchobair]

I.T. Guy gets called into his Bosses office:
"PS3s, huh? What? On invoice... right, ooooh, those PS3s... oh, hmm yeah I ordered those, they are for... uhm... they're for breaking passwords to... crack down on... hmm, child pornography. Right! Yeah, that's what they are for. The guys are just finishing testing the... the hardware. I'll go check on them."
*Runs back to desk and hides copies of Modern Warfare 2*

Ignorance is punished on slashdot.

[bipbop]

It should be. If you don't know what you're talking about, you have your choice of not saying anything or doing some research. I don't think there's any excuse to spread misinformation, even by implication!

Re:Nvidia 8800GT PS3

[ymgve]

I modified code from this SHA1 cracker. Good enough evidence?

Re:Is this April 1st?

[theaveng]

Perhaps they were thinking along these lines: No Freedom To Tinker: Arrested For Modding Legally Purchased Game Consoles
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090804/1537125771.shtml

More : http://www.google.com/search?q=man+arrested+for+modding+console

Tense error

[tepples]

Fat PS3s are built

No, fat PS3s were built. Sony has since discontinued the form factor.

next time...

[overcaffein8d]

...they should check under the mousepad

Re:Nvidia 8800GT PS3

[Lord_Jeremy]

Fair enough. Sorry to doubt you at first, but at the time it seemed there was no basis for your claim.

PS3s are really good for decrypting

[Bobberly]

You should take a look at www.distributed.net. Supposedly the RC5-72 challenge could end in 6 months with about 100 PS3s contributing.

Re:Obama fails again...

[notque]

First, kudos. Nice thread jack.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed isn't an enemy of war. War is government to government conflict. Al Qaida is not a government.

Obama is talking like a prosecutor (which makes sense). He will still be presumed Innocent until proven guilty in the courts.

Blowing up Afghanistan was over a simple issue.

Bush said, Hand over Bin Laden or the US will bomb you.

The Taliban said, Provide evidence, and we'll hand over Bin Laden

Bush said, We don't have to provide evidence, we will bomb if you if don't comply.

So we actually bombed Afghanistan because Afghanistan refused to turn over a criminal within our country without evidence. It had nothing to do with innocence or guilt.

I have a 256 character binary password.....

[KPexEA]

I have a custom password entry box whereby I enter a filename, offset and length and then it grabs the password from inside of the file at the offset and length I specified. The filename can by ANY file on the whole machine (or on removeable media like a USB key).

I guess the PS3 is more powerful than I realized

[falconwolf]

PS3s use the Cell microprocessor.

Falcon

innocent until proven guilty

[abracagrabya]

Innocent until proven guilty disappeared slowly, but surely... bit by bit... a long time ago in the USA. Think of drunk driving check points... if everyone is presumed guilty, until proven innocent... then nobody is innocent until proven guilty. Same thing as scanning everyone at the airports. Guilty until proven innocent.

Re:Nvidia 8800GT PS3

[zaffir]

The Cell is the CPU, not the GPU, of the PS3. Anyone saying the CPU is powerful because of its GPU is wrong. The GPU in the PS3 is actually kinda weak, but the six 128 bit vector processors hanging off the back of a main processor in the Cell are quite fast. Not as fast at SOME tasks as something capable of running CUDA code, but still really fast and far more general purpose.

That said, for this application I don't know why they aren't using something like a machine with a few NVidia graphics boards in it.

silly story

[astar]

regarding your sig

I once had a printer catch on fire. At least the paper. It had four big matrix heads with big selenoids driving the wires. They drew quite a bit of current. One jammed up the wires, heated up, and paper started smoking and charing. Naturally, it was the payroll checks, but as a result I was keeping a close eye on them. Only time I missed payroll deadlines.

North Korea is still the

[falconwolf]

Democratic People's Republic of Korea ... and they've abandoned democracy, a republic, and their people ...

No, North Korea is still a republic, there is no monarchy in North Korea.

Falcon

Re:North Korea is still the

[c6gunner]

No, North Korea is still a republic, there is no monarchy in North Korea.

You know, I almost replied with "touche, sir". However, now that you've got me thinking about it ... here's the wikipedia definition of a Monarchy:

A 'Monarchy' is a form of government in which supreme power is absolutely or nominally lodged with an individual, who is the head of state, often for life or until abdication, and "is wholly set apart from all other members of the state."

I'd say li'l Kim certainly qualifies for the title of "Monarch". It may not be a traditional European monarchy, but it certainly has it's similarities. Kim Il-sung ruled until he died. Upon his death, Kim Jong Il took over, and will continue to rule until he dies. The Kim's nominally have councils which share power with them but, really, these are little better than the lords and viziers of old.

In fact, the only really weird thing about this particular monarchy is that Kim Il-sung is still considered to be the ruler, despite the slight handicap of being deceased. Would that make it a Necroarchy?

Re:Obama fails again...

[G-Man]

- All those officers and enlisted in the Pentagon would be surprised to know they are civilians.

- Are they going to release KSM if he is acquitted? If not, this is just a show trial and a sham.

- Whatever your stance on waterboarding, they didn't do it to KSM to get him to confess. They did it to acquire intel to prevent further attacks and/or take the battle to Al Qaeda.

- During an interview with NBC tonight, the interviewer asked Obama if people would find it offensive that KSM would receive all the rights of an American citizen in a trial. Obama replied "I don't think it will be offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him." Pre-judging much? Tainting the jury?

Come on. This is no trial in any real sense of the word. Other observers have pointed out that no one wants to see this guy walk, so the judges and prosecution will go through any contortion, no matter how ridiculous, to see him convicted. Whatever rulings they issue will then become precedent the Govt can use against everyday criminals (i.e., you and me).

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the *enemy*. He cannot be rehabilitated. He cannot be reconstructed. He and his comrades would seek the overthrow of our system of government and its replacement with Sharia law. He is not a common criminal, and it is disrespectful to treat him like one - and you should always respect your enemy. Send him to his god and be done with it.

linux id Cells

[falconwolf]

If memory servers, the cell platform in a PS3 doesn't allow you to use all of the cores when you're running linux

It's the hardware Sony includes on PS3s that don't work well with Linux. IBM supports Linux on Cells.

Falcon

Re:Is this April 1st?

[JStegmaier]

Because you must be new here?

Interesting...

[jonaskoelker]

So, with a brute force attack, I've only got 36,030,233,524,592,808,479,552,335 years before they will reach mine!

If that figure is accurate and (very) precise, I can actually go and compute what your password is ;-)

Whoa...

[uvajed_ekil]

I know there are plenty of real pervs out there, but are the authorities really seizing so much suspected, carefully encrypted kiddie porn to necessitate systems of this magnitude and complexity? My suspicion is that they are using this for "off the record" uses, as well as legitimate ones. Surely some criminally perverted folks are smart enough to use some sort of electronic security measures to protect their stash, but how many, out of how many pedophiles there are, and how many of them are caught and have their filthy computers analyzed? I guess politicians and appointed officials can't ask about supposed anti-child porn measures, just as no one can question anything done in the name of patriotism, fighting terrorism, or when something like cancer prevention is involved. Or is this problem that much bigger than the rest of us take it to be?

Re:Obama fails again...

[iamhigh]

- All those officers and enlisted in the Pentagon would be surprised to know they are civilians.

The majority of casualties were civilian. This was not an act of traditional war. This is far, far different than the cut and dry battlefield that the Geneva Conventions were based on.

- Are they going to release KSM if he is acquitted? If not, this is just a show trial and a sham.

If 12 New Yorkers can't find this guy guilty, then I am pretty damn sure he didn't do it. And he will not be realeased in the US, no matter what.

Come on. This is no trial in any real sense of the word. Other observers have pointed out that no one wants to see this guy walk, so the judges and prosecution will go through any contortion, no matter how ridiculous, to see him convicted. Whatever rulings they issue will then become precedent the Govt can use against everyday criminals (i.e., you and me).

And neither was the case for the the unabomber, OKC bombing or any other big trial. This is no different. As for precedent... where do you live that planning (and following thru) to kill thousands isn't already firmly against the law?

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the *enemy*. He cannot be rehabilitated. He cannot be reconstructed. He and his comrades would seek the overthrow of our system of government and its replacement with Sharia law. He is not a common criminal, and it is disrespectful to treat him like one - and you should always respect your enemy. Send him to his god and be done with it.

Oh yeah, the prez was the one prejudging, eh?

Re:Is this April 1st?

[fm6]

Russia was never socialist to begin with.

We could argue that, but it's kind of beside the point. It was officially socialist. And they did ban private enterprise for most of their history. Now it's officially non-socialistic and you can't get arrested just for starting a business.

Socialism is an ideology which they hid behind in order to suppress dissent and criticism.

You have a very comic book understanding of history. In real life, cynics don't win revolutions. Which is actually too bad — if Lenin had been more cynical, he wouldn't have been so willing to murder anybody who stood in the way of his dream of a Marxist Utopia.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[c6gunner]

You have a very comic book understanding of history. In real life, cynics don't win revolutions.

I'm not sure which comics you've been reading, but they've clearly mislead you about the meaning of the word "cynic". Neither the original meaning nor the modern usage fit the concept which you're trying to describe. You could call ME a cynic (although I do not consider myself one), but there's nothing cynical about using the beliefs of others as camouflage in order to attain your own goals. That's simply called "lying", and it's something which all politicians do.

Which is actually too bad — if Lenin had been more cynical, he wouldn't have been so willing to murder anybody who stood in the way of his dream of a Marxist Utopia.

You could make the argument that Lenin really believed in Marxism - maybe. He went against some of the most important points of Marxism, but you could blame that on his ignorance. There is absolutely no way, however, that you could make a similar argument for Stalin.

None of that, however, changes the fact that Russia was never socialist. It was more of an underground capitalist society based on the barter system, ruled by a tyrannical herd of bureaucrats. If the basic tenet of socialism is equal opportunity and treatment of all, then the US today is more socialist than the USSR ever was.

Judge Napolitano

[falconwolf]

Have you read any of his books? I haven't yet but I've thought of buying one. From what I've heard or read about him I'd like him on the US Supreme Court as a Justice.

Falcon

Truecrypt is not open source

[falconwolf]

TrueCrypt is open source and is available for download from Source Forge, which hosts open source projects. And here's the downloadable source code.

Falcon

I agree, seems like a gimmick

[MoxFulder]

If the child porn smuggler is smart and careful, 20 PS3's won't be anywhere near enough to break strong, modern, encryption.

If he's dumb, there will be an easier way to decrypt the suspect data. Maybe the perp left the encryption key in plaintext somewhere, or used an obvious passphrase, or a weak or buggy encryption software.

There's no happy medium. What can you break with 20 PS3's? Maybe 56-bit DES?

While the key of DES is easy to brute-force today, and 80-bit keys are becoming questionable, 128-bit keys of high-quality algorithms are thought to be unbreakable via conventional (non-quantum) computers for the foreseeable future. There's a reason that the NSA is the second-largest electric utility user in Maryland...

More than that

[aepervius]

Some of the system I used allowed to enter with alt+3 digits other ascii char like 00. You just need to know and try if it allows it or not, taking the risk that a later update will break it down, but that is valid only if you updates on regular basis. I do not use that trick anymore but when i use a passphrase for important stuff, there is no space but the dictionary word are distorted (1 br3ak [th!s] 0_n_e) and mixed with various char like ,;:.-_+/ etc... 6 words out of a dictionary is not a decent passphrase *at all* as you can use dictionary. 6 word warped and mixed with various char is neigh unbreakable.

I call sheeninagan on that

[aepervius]

That would only works if the password is kept on a temporary file. Otherwise there is no reason whatsoever the password would be anywhere on disk. And that does not work at all if you use a bootable CD.

Re:I call sheeninagan on that

[bertok]

That would only works if the password is kept on a temporary file. Otherwise there is no reason whatsoever the password would be anywhere on disk. And that does not work at all if you use a bootable CD.

But that's not how it happens in the real world. Most people don't run their computers from read-only media with the swap turned off!

First of all, there's lots of bad developers out there. Passwords get saved all over the place, in the registry, configuration files, etc... I've seen web sites that were "https", but then put the plain text password into the URL, which is saved in the unencrypted browser history!

Second, even if you store passwords in memory only, the pagefile might still contain it, if a page containing the password was swapped out. It's even more likely with hibernation files, which swap out everything, including kernel space marked as non-pageable.

In theory, there's features like "protected memory" that developers can use to store passwords securely in memory, but this takes a lot of work. In Win32 there's a set of APIs for it, but many developers don't use it, or haven't even heard of it. It's such a low level "buffer manipulation" style API that lots of high-level languages can't or don't use it. It's only recently that C# got support for it, for example, and I don't think Java has anything comparable. Most garbage-collecting languages are vulnerable, because memory can be relocated (copied) at any time, which may prevent buffers from being properly cleared.

One of the worst culprits are those "I forgot my password" web pages that email you your plain text password to your mailbox, so that your email client can then cheerfully write it all over the place. Even if you encrypt your PC's disk, but use corporate email, your password is now in plain text, on the server's disk.

In practice, real security is hard. Very, very hard. As a consultant, I've been to over 100 clients, including major banks and very security sensitive government institutions, and I've only ever seen 2 secure networks: One financial services company, and the internal LAN on the new generation Boeing planes.

Re:I call sheeninagan on that

[FrankDerKte]

Ever used svn ? - You're screwed.

Re:I call sheeninagan on that

[Bert64]

As well as the password now being in plain text on your mail server and transmitted over the internet... Your password was obviously stored unencrypted or using reversible encryption on the server, most likely the former. It is extremely rare for servers to encrypt data, or if they do they also keep the key on the machine too (so the machine can boot unattended).

I have similar experience to you, and yes... cost or convenience triumphs over security in virtually every case.

Dissenting

[ChePibe]

Aside from the fact that adequate grounds exist for military jurisdiction based on the Pentagon portion of the attack - and the fact that the act KSM is most likely to be charged with conspiracy, which certainly occurred outside of the U.S. - the analysis is far more complex if one has a basic understanding of criminal procedure. The very high standard of proof required to convict in a criminal court, and the complexity of the rules of evidence - particularly when considering the difficulty of trying a conspiracy charge. Hell, as a law student, I spent untold hours just looking at hearsay and its numerous exceptions. Not to mention the issue of evidence extracted during and after water boarding sessions and other interrogation

I obviously haven't seen the prosecution's evidence in full, but if this were a more traditional criminal charge, I'd wager that they would have one hell of a tough row to hoe. Keep in mind that, if the law is applied as it should be, a jury may only consider evidence that has been admitted before the Court. If vital bits of evidence are excluded--a scenario that is certainly feasible--can the prosecutors successfully prove the elements of the crime KSM is charged with? If not, in a real trial, he would have to be let free.

Of course, this isn't going to be a real trial.

Assume that KSM is acquitted. There is obviously no chance he'll ever be released, nor could he be released onto U.S. territory at all, of course, under the Immigration and Naturalization Act. A real criminal trial would carry with it the vagaries and risks associated with any criminal trial, no matter how "air tight" a case is (e.g., O.J. Simpson), and the possibility of an acquittal and release.

I fear what we have here with the upcoming KSM trial is more of a show trial. The conviction, execution, and virtually pre-determined, or at least that is how Obama is treating it in statements to the press (as a lawyer and former law professor, he should know better, as he acknowledged with his subsequent ass covering).

Aside from some of the more obvious questions (Why a criminal trial for only this handful? Why are military tribunals "good enough" for the rest? Why has Obama shifted support from the military tribunals he once supported specifically for KSM to the civilian courts? How will classified evidence be handled? Will KSM truly be given full access to all the evidence against him, including names of informants?) are the more larger concerns. Why a show trial for this person? Why now? Will show trials become the norm for the particularly loathsome among us? For those it is more politically convenient for the president to try via show trial? Is this the direction we would like to go in?

If this were to be a real trial, it would be a demonstration of the Obama administration's willingness to take unacceptable risks on national security, particularly since a much friendlier venue is allowed under law and some of the trickier, thornier aspects of the law can be avoided. Instead, it may prove to be a perversion of the criminal justice system, which has rules that are much better established and protect every single American citizen. Why open the door to show trials?

Re:Dissenting

[ubrgeek]

If he is acquitted, could he then be tried in a military court?

ICE

[westlake]

... suuuuuure.

Purely as a novelty, the geek might ask himself what ICE is and what it does.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has quite a lot on its plate, as this list of Programs would suggest.

The Cyber Crimes Center (C3) Child Exploitation Section (CES) investigates the trans-border dimension of large-scale producers and distributors of images of child abuse, as well as individuals who travel in foreign commerce for the purpose of engaging in sex with minors. The CES employs the latest technology to collect evidence and track the activities of individuals and organized groups who sexually exploit children through the use of websites, chat rooms, newsgroups, and peer-to-peer trading. These investigative activities are organized under Operation Predator, a program managed by the CES. The CES also conducts clandestine operations throughout the world to identify and apprehend violators.

C3 brings the full range of ICE computer and forensic assets together in a single location to combat such Internet-related crimes as:

* Possession, manufacture and distribution of images of child abuse.
* International money laundering and illegal cyber-banking.
* Illegal arms trafficking and illegal export of strategic/controlled commodities.
* Drug trafficking (including prohibited pharmaceuticals).
* General Smuggling (including the trafficking in stolen art and antiquities; violations of the Endangered Species Act etc.)
* Intellectual property rights violations (including music and software).
* Immigration violations; identity and benefit fraud

The phrase "images of child abuse" is telling. This is how the professional in law enforcement defines child pornography.

Operation Mango -- An extensive investigation that closed down an American-owned beachside resort in Acapulco, Mexico, which offered children to sexual predators. The resort was a haven for pedophiles that traveled to the facility for the sole purpose of engaging in sex with minors. The proprietor of the business was convicted. As a result of this investigation and others, the government of Mexico recently created a Federal task force to address crimes against children in its country. Cyber Crimes Center

The VGTF is an international alliance of law enforcement agencies from the U.S., UK, Australia and Canada, working together to make the Internet a safer place; to identify, locate and help children at risk; and to hold those who commit on-line child abuse appropriately accountable. On-line child abuse includes activities such as searching for, sharing and downloading images of children being physically and sexually abused and engaging children in chat rooms with the intention of committing sexual abuse both on and off-line. The VGTF delivers innovative crime prevention and crime reduction initiatives to prevent and deter individuals from committing on-line child abuse.

ICE also partners with several Non-Governmental Organizations, including the National center for Missing & Exploited Children, Netsmartz, World Vision and Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, to fight crimes against children. Operation Predator

Re:Is this April 1st?

[fm6]

I have problems with your semantics (lying and cynicism are not mutually exclusive) but that's a secondary issue. You basic argument is that the USSR never lived up to its socialist ideals and therefore was just another dictatorship, and there's no real difference between the old USSR and the new Russian Federation.

But there are lots of differences. Private enterprise is no longer illegal, and indeed now dominates the Russian economy. The Russian Orthodox Church is no longer persecuted. (Sadly, the same can't be said for some other faiths.) Travel in and out of the country is no longer tightly controlled.

There are many things about the current system that suck. But the things that suck are not the same things that sucked under the Soviet Union.

Article is devoid of any info

[this great guy]

ighashgpu bruteforces Windows NTLM password hashes at a rate of 2.4 billion password/sec on a single GPU (HD 5870). What does this mean with respect to TFA and its measly "4 million/sec"?

Many of the discussions here completely miss the point that bruteforcing rates depend entirely on what is being bruteforced. For example if you look at JtR password hash bruteforcing benchmarks you can see rates with a Core i7 920 anywhere between a measly 758 password/sec (bcrypt) up to 14.6 million password/sec (LanMan). This spans 5 orders of magnitude! It's the same for encrypted files. For example PGP files encrypted with a symetric key issued from the Simple S2K mechanism can be bruteforced at millions of password/sec with a regular CPU, but this can drop to only a handful of password/sec if Iterated+Salted S2K was used with a decent S2K count...

Therefore all these discussions about whether "4 million/sec" is good/bad/improbable are completely irrelevant since the article is devoid of any info about what is being bruteforced.

Re:Article is devoid of any info

[jonbryce]

NTLM passwords are very easy to crack. You get a set of rainbow tables, which for the full set, comes on a 500GB hard drive, and you can look up the hash in the table and find the matching password. They are arranged in such a way that you don't have to look through every item in the table to find the one you want.

Re:Article is devoid of any info

[Bert64]

There's a cluster capable version of john the ripper too, http://www.bindshell.net/tools/johntheripper
Some people benchmarked it on a top500 system a few years ago (was well within the top 100 if i remember), but i seem to be unable to find the benchmark output right now...

Re:Article is devoid of any info

[this great guy]

Actually no. All current public NTLM rainbow tables (freerainbowtables.com, schmoo tables, some chinese ones, etc) have been rendered useless with current generations of GPUs. To give you an example there is a small 50GB NTLM table out there for a keyspace than can be covered in less than 30sec by an HD 5870. Moreover NTLM passwords or hashes (plural) are not easy to crack with rainbow tables. The complexity to crack N passwords with rainbow tables is O(N) whereas a traditional bruteforcer will crack them in O(1). The reason is because a bruteforcer uses bloom filters or hashtables to match candidate hashes again any number of NTLM hashes in parallel without slowing down too much as the # of hashes increases. Therefore there is a tradeoff where if you have to crack more than a certain number of NTLM hashes, rainbow tables will be less efficient than a bruteforcer.

What could be useful is rainbow tables built by GPUs with parameters targeted for GPUs (in particular chain lengths of 1e5 or 1e6 or more). An acquaintance of mine is precisely working on such a project...

Re:Obama fails again...

[furball]

The majority of casualties were civilian.

How many dead officers is required to warrant a military trial?

I'll fucking TELL you what the problem is

[fnj]

Really what is the problem with this. These computers are being searched AFTER a judge issues a search warrant.

Yeah. Because if the fucking retards who run the legislature pass some outrageous bill against thought crime or victimless crime which gets signed into law by a President or Governor who is devious and pandering enough to be elected by a majority of the drooling morons who make up the voting citizenry, and then some prosecutor who has something against my politics and has the goods on some judge and gets a baseless warrant at three o'clock in the morning; then I must be guilty as Hell, right?

Re:I'll fucking TELL you what the problem is

[LWATCDR]

First of all I don't think child molestation or kiddie porn is a victim less crime. I would be the majority of people also feel the same way.
I am sorry that you have such a low opinion of the rest of the population but frankly your statements do not put you in my high esteem.
Frankly they are pretty stupid.
"then some prosecutor who has something against my politics and has the goods on some judge and gets a baseless warrant at three o'clock in the morning; then I must be guilty as Hell, right?"

Wow you must think pretty highly of yourself to think that some mythical prosecutor would make the effort to frame you.
I suggest you find a cabin somewhere in the woods to hide from the black helicopters asap.

Re:PS3 GPU access from Linux?

[OrangeTide]

Well you can access some of the SPUs from Linux.
If you were building a costly enough cluster, it may be possible to justify the cost of the development kits. But I wonder if Sony would sell the kit to you knowing that you're just costing them a bunch of money buying below cost hardware.

Re:Nvidia 8800GT PS3

[TheThiefMaster]

The Cell (at least the usable portion) is less than twice as powerful as the xbox 360's tri-core cpu. The gpu is weaker than the 360's, and it is slightly more powerful than the cell, but even harder to program for. Overall, both consoles have a similar theoretical performance.

The cpu+gpu put together in either one are still outclassed by just your 8800GT, let alone a modern gpu (the GTX 285 is single-chip and readily available, and 3-4x as powerful as your 8800). This is all working in single-precision, and I can't find any single-precision performance numbers for a modern cpu, but I'd bet that they easily outclass PS3s too.

Though the article makes it sound like they chose PS3s for their performance/cost ratio, so the fact that it doesn't have top-end outright performance is perhaps irrelevant to them. I still think they should have got a cell-chip-based blade server, using the double-precision version of the cell chip (which is not the one that's in the PS3), and probably would have access to two more SPUs (the PS3 reserves one for OS and has one disabled for yeild) per cell chip. Knowing reporting these days, that's probably what they did get.

That's 4 words+

[PMBjornerud]

Two words: Rainbow tables.

One word: Salt

Re:That's 4 words+

[Bert64]

Windows password encryption still doesn't use salts, most of the people being attacked will be using windows and a lot of those schemes will hang off the system password.. Even if the encryption on the data is very strong, if it relies on windows standard hashing to store the passwords then you just attack that - the weakest link.

A disturbingly large number of encryption programs rely on the weak password encryption employed by windows, especially in corporate networks.

To quote Spock...

[petrus4]

"Fascinating."

I honestly had no idea that government was capable of thinking this far outside the box. This is cause for either great optimism, or equal fear, depending on your perspective.

Re:Obama fails again...

[aussie_a]

And if not, I'd like to ask The Man why it isn't illegal.

I would hazard a guess it isn't illegal because torture is of course illegal so therefore you couldn't possibly produce evidence through torture. If America acknowledges these people have been tortured, surely criminal proceedings would have to take place against SOMEBODY.

1535 billion years....

[Tord]

Hm, 60 PS3s chrunching away at 4 million passwords per second each. Giving a total of 240 million passwords tested each second.

My TrueCrypt volume has a 19 character alphanumerical password, not truly random but nothing you can use a dictionary against. Only lowercase + numbers but still more than 30 characters to choose from.

Given that they knew all this and tried to brute force my password using their PS3s it would still take them more than 1535 billion years...

I think they need to up their game or go a totally different route if they ever want to be able to look inside my harddrive and prosecute me for any of its content before I'm burried in a chest...

Re:Obama fails again...

[Calinous]

One military offender. Military courts do not judge civilians, and civilians are not affected by military laws.
      On the other side, military justice can judge and condemn a man that have already been condemned by a civilian court (which no civilian court can)

Re:Obama fails again...

[ppanon]

Good point. I seem to remember that some of the earlier Bush-proposed legal frameworks for military tribunals (which were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional) allowed evidence obtained after torture, but the current framework doesn't. Apparently, Australia is finding that overly restrictive, but in a way that's probably got some ex-Bush administration officials worried over their actions.

Re:Obama fails again...

[furball]

One military offender. Military courts do not judge civilians, and civilians are not affected by military laws.

Is what you said true? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte_Quirin

The defendant's targets were economic targets, not military. The target was on domestic soil. The Supreme Court decision was that military tribunal was the appropriate mechanism to try them. In summary, not a military target, on domestic soil, defendants were also not military according to the details of the case.

Maths is fun!

[PGillingwater]

Just a small note to all those clever people who are calculating the time taken to perform an exhaustive keyspace search on the potential passwords.

We should distinguish between the MAXIMUM time taken to exhaust the symbol space, versus the AVERAGE time.

Assuming uniform distribution of passwords through the space, and a sufficiently large sample of challenges, we would naturally expect the time taken to find the correct password to converge on n/2 -- i.e., half of the maximum time.

Thus, if a symbol space can be exhaustively searched in one year, on average, finding passwords with a similar difficulty level will take an average of 6 months, with a typical normal distribution.

Re:Obama fails again...

[4181]

How many dead officers is required to warrant a military trial?

One private will do, if it's on foreign soil. DC may not be a state, but it's still US soil ...

The Pentagon is not in D.C.; it is in Arlington, Virginia. (Not that this bears on your particular argument.)

Re:Is this April 1st?

[Dr.Syshalt]

tell that to Georgia, the Ukraine, the Baltic States, and Poland.

I don't get it. How the heavy presence of USA in those countries, involvement in their political life and military training connected to Soviet Russia?

Re:Obama fails again...

[4181]

The Pentagon is not in D.C.; it is in Arlington, Virginia. (Not that this bears on your particular argument.)

Although it does use D.C. zip codes.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[c6gunner]

I have problems with your semantics (lying and cynicism are not mutually exclusive)

Never said they were.

and there's no real difference between the old USSR and the new Russian Federation.

Never said that, either.

Re:Nvidia 8800GT PS3

[jcupitt65]

I can't find any single-precision performance numbers for a modern cpu, but I'd bet that they easily outclass PS3s too.

It depends on the benchmark. The IBM whitepapers on the Cell have a matrix multiplication program which (after quite a bit of tuning) went just over 200 gflops. A Core2Duo has a theoretical peak of about 15 gflops.

Of course the C2D will be much faster than the Cell with most general programs, but with math that parallelises well and that you spend some time hand-tuning, the Cell can be very quick.

Re:Nvidia 8800GT PS3

[TheThiefMaster]

I did find that the Intel Core i7 has a theoretical of 70 double-precision gflops. The single-precision number should be much higher, as the Pentium 4 apparently managed 70 single-precision gflops.

Still, compared to the top-end gfx chips' over 1 TFlop of power, the cell is weedy.

Have they heard of the ASUS ESC 1000 ?

[DNX Blandy]

Link: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Asus-Nvidia-Supercomputer-Cores-960,8943.html I know it costs more but when you consider you'll get 1.1 teraflops of power, it'll munch away at a mental speed. All this in a standard PC tower!!!

Re:Obama fails again...

[Calinous]

Aye, my opinion is from Romania, bastion of democracy...

Re: Roman Empire

[viraltus]

Not sure why you insist so much about the presumption of innocence being established by the US as "...we know it today". It seems it goes really far far back in time at least to the Roman Empire. http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/Law508/InnocentGuilty.htm

Re:Nvidia 8800GT PS3

[ymgve]

Why would you want the double-precision version? Crypto is all about integer math.

Re:Nvidia 8800GT PS3

[TheThiefMaster]

The "double-precision version" I was talking about wasn't for its double-precision capabilities, more for the fact that it's a newer and more powerful version of the cell chip in general. My apologies for not being clearer.

Re:Nvidia 8800GT PS3

[TheThiefMaster]

The PPE is almost exactly the same as a single core of the 360's chip. The SPUs are each about the same as well, but their power is limited by insanely small local memory and huge latencies to the main memory (to the point where they can't read it directly, they have to issue DMA transfers).

This gives the PS3's cell theoretically 2.3x the performance of the 360's cpu (1 PPE + 6 SPUs in the PS3 vs essentially 3 PPEs in the 360), but in practice less than 2x. When running games the OS reserves one SPE, and one is disabled to improve manufacturing yield, which is why I say 6 SPUs. I don't know if the 7th is available to use when the PS3 is running Linux, but I doubt it.

Folding's own PS3 FAQ says that "The GPU client is still the fastest", blowing your claim of "a single PS3 outputiing 10x what a GPU based algorythm is kicking out". In fact, the stats page shows GPUs contributing more TFLOPS worth of work units than PS3s, with fewer active clients, suggesting that GPUs are on average 3-4x as powerful as PS3s.

Lastly, I have been a PS3 and 360 developer for a few years now, so I think I might have some clue about their relative performance.

Re:Nvidia 8800GT PS3

[TheThiefMaster]

And before someone mentions it, I was talking in FLOPS because it's easier to find those numbers than integer ops numbers.

Collisions aren't slowed by key length/entropy

[GameboyRMH]

If your passphrase is reduced to an SHA1 or MD5 hash (apparently Linux distros use salted md5 for user passwords by default), it doesn't need to be brute-forced. You can generate a collision, the speed of which is affected only by the length of the hash and the available computing power (that is, sha1(password) takes just as long as sha1(I.u5e5^ub3r-l337+p@$VV0rds,y0!*I_R=a#5m4rt3y/m4n!) to break)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5#Vulnerability

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_attack

Of course this probably has very few practical uses - It can't be used to break into a TrueCrypt volume, and if someone has hashes (weak or otherwise) of your passwords they've either gained physical access to your PC with an unencrypted disk (and once your physical security is broken, you also become vulnerable to the xkcd wrench attack), or you're a total idiot (or both).

Re:Obama fails again...

[Xphile101361]

- All those officers and enlisted in the Pentagon would be surprised to know they are civilians.

- If one of those officers or enlisted was killed in a bar brawl, during a hit and run or by a dozen other things, what court system would be used?

- Are they going to release KSM if he is acquitted? If not, this is just a show trial and a sham.

- I doubt that it would be possible for him to be aquited, and I'm sure that new charges would be created if he was to keep him in prison. All perfectly legal.

- Whatever your stance on waterboarding, they didn't do it to KSM to get him to confess. They did it to acquire intel to prevent further attacks and/or take the battle to Al Qaeda.

- Then they shouldn't be worried about that evidence not being admitted to court

- During an interview with NBC tonight, the interviewer asked Obama if people would find it offensive that KSM would receive all the rights of an American citizen in a trial. Obama replied "I don't think it will be offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him." Pre-judging much? Tainting the jury?

Honestly, I hope that the death penalty is ignored in this case. First, it is probably what the guy wants. Second, it will be used as propaganda by someone, most likely causing more people to die. I just generally like the idea of finding him a small dark hole, about 6 feet by 6 feet that has no windows and a single light. Locking him in there for the rest of his life and letting the world forget about him.

Immaterial.

[Hasai]

What counts is how fast the target of such a brute-force attack accepts the passwords. If it only accepts one password every five seconds, guess what?

Idiot article.

Re:And Sony's thoughts?

[NotBornYesterday]

This is what they get for rootkitting our PCs.

Re:Obama fails again...

[Veretax]

Not to play devils adovocate here, but in the eight years since the destruction of the twin towers, what compells you to believe that KSM actually would get a 'fair' trial, and that they can actually find a 'jury of his peers' that won't already think he is guilty?

Wonder what they are doing....

[DrRiAdGeOrN]

Wonder what the PS3's are being used for in between crack attempts.....

Re:Obama fails again...

[dissy]

- Whatever your stance on waterboarding, they didn't do it to KSM to get him to confess. They did it to acquire intel to prevent further attacks and/or take the battle to Al Qaeda.

That might be what they claim, but it is a lie and not what they did.

There are only two things torture can even possibly get you.
  A) revenge against someone
  B) force someone to echo what you want them to say.

Revenge is revenge. I'm sure that was a large part of why we torture now.
As for B, might as well just write out a confession and sign it for them. It means just as much and is a lot quicker to get. Doesn't get you as much revenge however with that option.

So, while I can use torture to force you to echo back something, like 'say you murdered that person!', no matter what you say (or don't say) that can not possibly indicate anything about you (other than you want the torture to stop), all it really proves is the torturer instructed the victim to say something, and the victim did.

So you are correct that they did not torture him to get him to confess, since that is not possible.
But you are incorrect that they did it for intel, since that is also not possible.
You are also incorrect that they did it to prevent anything, like your example of future attacks, since that too is impossible.

I'm sure they have at some point CLAIMED it was for that, but there have been hundreds of different claims why they do it, but any that are not one of the two above are still lies.

Close...

[DarthVain]

My current one is something like "StupidITPassWordPolicy#23"

I can't wait til I somehow get locked out or something and have to call IT help desk to look it up...

Notice length, upper and lower, special chara, numbers..... and know that that number is required to change frequently...

The one concession they made was it used to also compare the only and the new and if ANY part of it was identical it wouldn't accept it (like Password3 and Password4, etc...)

I am sure that not brings down the percentage of people that write their password each week on a sticky note and stick it to their monitor from 95% to 80%... Well done IT genius, well done. Truly we are all more secure for your wonderfully well through out ideas.

    -Bitter.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[fm6]

I have problems with your semantics (lying and cynicism are not mutually exclusive)

Never said they were.

OK, my bad. When you said "there's nothing cynical about using the beliefs of others as camouflage in order to attain your own goals." I should have pointed you at a dictionary that that clearly contradicts you.

and there's no real difference between the old USSR and the new Russian Federation.

Never said that, either.

Really? Then I have no idea what point you're trying to make.

Oops, read that as 100M/s

[Khopesh]

I mis-read my notes; that 100k/s figure for your standard desktop is actually 100M/s and comes from the password cracking competition at distributed.net. According to their current live stats, the fastest single-CPU system (an Intel Core i7 2666Mhz) is cracking ogrng at 204M/s and the average is 5.5M (with a wild standard deviation of 8.6M) and from current live multi-CPU stats, a 4-CPU Intel Core 2 quad-core (16 cores) at 3110MHz is cracking rc572 at 450.8M/s and the average is 36M (stdev=51M). That puts 100M/s at more than a standard deviation above average for even a multi-CPU system and more than ten standard deviations above the average single-CPU system.

The PS3s at 200k apiece look pretty measly now, falling well under the average desktop on Dnet (5.5M). Since even an AMD K6 can crunch away at 300k/s on rc572, it's probably reasonable to say that they're cracking something tougher than anything at Dnet. Generously pinning the PS3 to the Intel Core 2 Quad 3GHz (40M/s) means dividing my Dnet numbers by 200 or multiplying the government's numbers by 200.

At 40M/s times the 60 PS3s, we'd come to 2.4G/s, which can break an 8-character alphanumeric password in a day and an 8-character random printable (includes punctuation et al, 6.5 bits of complexity) in 22.7 days. Bring that to ten characters or six characters plus two words and you're suddenly talking about 500 years. Assuming they actively upgrade with no loss to data (to fit Moore's Law) and you're looking at 9 years ( log2(500) ).

I figure military-grade is probably 10-100G/s (with continuous upgrades according to Moore's Law), which would still take 3-7 years to find a 10-char password but blows through the 8-char password in 4-7 hours.

Re:Obama fails again...

[DM9290]

- During an interview with NBC tonight, the interviewer asked Obama if people would find it offensive that KSM would receive all the rights of an American citizen in a trial. Obama replied "I don't think it will be offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him." Pre-judging much? Tainting the jury?

If the Executive branch didn't already believe someone deserved to be convicted and put to death, they would not be prosecuting in the first place.

This taints the jury just as much as if the defendant came out in public and said "I didn't do it!".

which is : not at all.

what would taint the jury is if Obama went beyond merely saying someone was guilty, and starting making arguments presenting evidence in public or presenting witnesses.

For the prosecution to claim confidence in a guilty verdict is expected. I should hope no prosecutor ever proceeds with a trial if they are not personally convinced that the accused is in fact guilty, and they have the evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

Re:Obama fails again...

[DM9290]

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the *enemy*. He cannot be rehabilitated. He cannot be reconstructed. He and his comrades would seek the overthrow of our system of government and its replacement with Sharia law. He is not a common criminal, and it is disrespectful to treat him like one - and you should always respect your enemy. Send him to his god and be done with it.

He would love that. treating him like a common criminal is the most humiliating thing you can do to him.
And seriously... unless the state has evidence to prove such allegations I would not want to live in a place that any government officials have the power to just go around and kill people with no due process.

This is a land where the rule of law, the constitution, and the fundamental principles of justice are supreme. if you hate your justice system so much that you would try to thwart it and impose your own vigilantee justice, then you are just as bad as any common criminal attempting to replace justice with Sharia law.

Justice demands a fair trial. And if the US can't give it, they should turn these people over to the Hague.

Re:As Idiomatick puts it...

[skarphace]

So I ask the /. crowd are there any good alternatives to passwords that are feasible? Something secure. Something that can be implemented on websites. What do you think we should be working towards? Is there already something in place that you can give an example of?

The best possible password is a phrase. Something simple like 'whereartthouromeo' is long, difficult to crack, and yet, still easy to remember. Now add some numbers, case change, and sepcial characters... 'WHEr3@r7thourom#)' is virtually impossible to crack. The password is not inherently flawed. It's still valid, useful, and machines are still too underpowered to crack that stuff.

Re:Obama fails again...

[b0bby]

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the *enemy*. He cannot be rehabilitated. He cannot be reconstructed. He and his comrades would seek the overthrow of our system of government and its replacement with Sharia law.

My view is, he's just like Timothy McVeigh, or an abortion clinic shooter. There's no way they can actually overthrow our system of government. They are non state terrorists, little more than common criminals, and really have very little power. Our system of the rule of law is much stronger and more important than any of them - and if we can't convict him in a court of law, then he should be freed. If he is freed and viewed as a serious threat, he should be kept under surveillance, but the rule of law is more important than any one individual.

Legal Test?

[Niet3sche]

It sounds like these PS3s are being "reverse-engineered" to run "non-stock" software on them, vis-a-vis password cracking.

I posit a direct and urgent need to determine two things:
(1) Method of operation;
(2) Scope and reach of the program.

This could make for an interesting legal test of DMCA/PATRIOT act laws.

What type of crypto?

[Bert64]

The article doesn't say what type of encryption they are trying to crack...
I assume it's only a fairly limited number of well known encryption programs they target with this, and by using something else you could avoid their attacks quite easily, at least until they implement support for it.

Re:Obama fails again...

[ZFox]

But you are incorrect that they did it for intel, since that is also not possible.

Where's the study or even a valid argument supporting this claim.

So, while I can use torture to force you to echo back something, like 'say you murdered that person!', no matter what you say (or don't say) that can not possibly indicate anything about you (other than you want the torture to stop), all it really proves is the torturer instructed the victim to say something, and the victim did.

Maybe, just maybe they would be smart enough (yes I'm still talking about the govt) not to ask questions like that. It's not like they were looking for confessions from the people; they're not police officers; they weren't even planning on bringing them to trial.

If you stop thinking about using enhanced interrogation techniques (haha, couldn't help myself) solely for a trial, maybe you will see how ludicrous your argument is. Maybe the govt knows an attack on a major US city is imminent, but they do not know the timing. Maybe they capture two or more people that they already know, through other means, were instrumental in the planning. Maybe they are able to get them to break, each giving the same details. Is that not intel?

Sure that is an extreme case, but it is cases like that where I can honestly say I would support the usage. If anything, allowing these terrorists to come to a US Court sets a precedent where the usage of information gathered by torture becomes acceptable in a criminal investigation.

Re:Obama fails again...

[dissy]

But you are incorrect that they did it for intel, since that is also not possible.

Where's the study or even a valid argument supporting this claim.

Ok. Studies and reports on them:

http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=20647
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/519416/
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2009/9/21/21847/9403
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-09/new-study-finds-torture-negatively-affects-memory

And further valid arguments supporting those claims:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30721458/print/1/displaymode/1098/
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/torture-is-more-than-just-harsh-tactics/
http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Dbq-Usefulness-Torture/132993

And at least one example of how this is a slippery slope that leads to nothing good:
  http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/arar/
If nothing else, please Please read about this person!

Do further googles (or wiki searches) for Maher Arar
Then just keep in mind there is NOTHING at all that happened nor will happen that would prevent you or anyone else you know from being in that persons shoes, by a random throw of the dice.

Sure that is an extreme case, but it is cases like that where I can honestly say I would support the usage. If anything, allowing these terrorists to come to a US Court sets a precedent where the usage of information gathered by torture becomes acceptable in a criminal investigation.

That is until they* come into your home at night, haul you and your wife/gf/S.O./whatever away to different prisons in another country and torture you for your terrorists connections for 9 months.
You are doing exactly everything required to qualify as a terrorist suspect under our current methods of determining who is or could be a terrorist, so it is not at all as far fetched as your extreme example is.

[*] They being all of the sociopaths that work their way into positions of power and dominance due to their personality requiring it, whom you are willingly and gladly giving permission to torture anyone and everyone (since that is our current definition of terrorist suspect)

Re:Obama fails again...

[Bobb Sledd]

OMG you're missing the point.

The reason you don't want him tried in a civil court is because he could not possibly be convicted there: He wasn't even properly Mirandized. That's just one technicality, I'm sure a competent attorney could easily find many more.

The problem is that KSM was found on a battlefield in a foreign country. He is not a US citizen. It doesn't make any sense to bring him back to America to try him in a civil court and give him rights reserved to US citizens, regardless of who the victims were.

I've also even heard it said from a NY federal judge (sorry, I don't know the name) that they aren't even set up to handle any case like this, both in legal process and in ensuring security/safety.

What you effectively set up with this precedence is this scenario: A group of terrorists decide to bomb a couple of ships simultaneously, one is a US Naval destroyer, and the other is a civilian cruise ship. All the terrorists are caught by the navy. No one knows which court they will be tried in, so there is a huge mess in processing (maybe some rights are read and some are not to all of them; maybe they are not told they have a right to an attorney). Now half of them are tried in a military tribunal, and half are tried in a civilian court of law. By what logic do you think this fiasco is the right way to conduct business?

You can't change horses in the middle of the stream like this. If you want to make a policy that all terrorists be brought to a civil court, then make that policy now for future terrorist arrests. Doing it now virtually guarantees they won't be convicted.

And even Eric Holder can't consistently answer why doing it for some and not others seems like a good idea.

Re:Obama fails again...

[Bobb Sledd]

I believe you are grossly ignorant and uninformed of multiple facts. Due to the amount of effort I'd have to invest in educating you (which I doubt you would be receptive to anyway), it is not even worth such a sophomoric discussion with a stranger.

Good day,

Re:Is this April 1st?

[c6gunner]

OK, my bad. When you said "there's nothing cynical about using the beliefs of others as camouflage in order to attain your own goals." I should have pointed you at a dictionary that that clearly contradicts you [merriam-webster.com].

Um ... what?

Here's the definitions from your source:

  - contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives
  - based on or reflecting a belief that human conduct is motivated primarily by self-interest
  - implies having a sneering disbelief in sincerity or integrity

How in the world can you possibly look at those, and decide that they contradict me? ...

Look, forget it. I don't know if you're currently going through ESL or what, but if you can't even properly parse a dictionary definition then I don't see how we can have an actual discussion. Take care.

Re:Obama fails again...

[alexo]

If you stop thinking about using enhanced interrogation techniques (haha, couldn't help myself) solely for a trial, maybe you will see how ludicrous your argument is. Maybe the govt knows an attack on a major US city is imminent, but they do not know the timing. Maybe they capture two or more people that they already know, through other means, were instrumental in the planning. Maybe they are able to get them to break, each giving the same details. Is that not intel?

How can you tell if the tortured person:
(a) is telling the truth,
(b) is making something up,
(c) tells you what (they think that) you want to hear,
(d) really have no clue, or
(e) some combination of the above?

Let's say Alice and Bob plan to blow the Brooklin Bridge on Dec 25th, but decide on a several alternative dates and locations to disclose if they are captured.
You capture them and beat the crap out of Alice. She mentions time and a place. Same with Bob.
Do you believe them? Do you continue the torture? Say you do and they confess to a different time and date. Was the first one correct? The second one? Neither?
The fact is that you have no way to ascertain, and the "detainees" know that. They know that telling the truth will not stop the torture because you can't be really sure. Great intel, right?

Or consider an alternative situation: you caught the wrong people and you will continue torturing the *innocent* until you are convinced that their *worthless* information is genuine, or until they die, whichever comes first.

Re:Obama fails again...

[iamhigh]

Hmmm.... What in my post made you think I would be unreceptive to education? I welcome your attempt to educate me. In face the other poster brought up a good point about the Geneva conventions being precisely to keep things cut and dry, but didn't do enough to change my mind (and I still don't see how it would be any different from any other act of terrorism that has been brought to federal court). Please, I am nothing if not flexible.

Re:Is this April 1st?

[fm6]

Yeah, I'm tired of arguing semantics too. Especially since you've been arguing with me for a dozen messages without making it clear what point you were trying to make.

Why isn't anyone mentioning the kicker?

[Phil Urich]

However, C3 must use pre-PS3 Slim units, as new restrictions introduced with the latest iteration of the console prevent the agency from installing the open-source operating system.

I mean, really, on such a tech-y I'm surprised more people aren't annoyed by Sony's thinly-rationalized retroactive lockout of other OSes! (Personally, it's the reason why I've gone from "yeah, I should definitely pick up a PS3" to "hmm, maybe if I run into a used one I'll buy it, I guess.") It's also interesting that even the U.S. government is locked out of such hardware when a company like Sony decides to restrict "homebrew" uses. There's a lot more to be said on that issue . . .

Re:Obama fails again...

[ubrgeek]

Tainting the jury? Probably not. Because of a general lack of interest in goings-on and the media, I'm guessing a huge number of people would have no idea who KSM is. The first they'll hear about him (or realize they are hearing about him) will be during jury selection.

Re:As Idiomatick puts it...

[AmiMoJo]

My bank has a good one where as well as a password you have to select the correct image. You get to choose which image you want. They also show you a different image that they pick so that you can be sure you are on the real bank web site (not a phishing site that wouldn't know which image to show).

Re:Obama fails again...

[Bobb Sledd]

OK. I'll try to keep it brief.

The majority of casualties were civilian. This was not an act of traditional war. This is far, far different than the cut and dry battlefield that the Geneva Conventions were based on.

1. It doesn't matter who the target is or who was killed. Contractors are killed all the time in Iraq and Afghanistan driving along with military personnel.

2. Those who were "arrested" in connection to these terroristic acts are not U.S. civilians, therefore should not be afforded same rights as U.S. citizens.

3. Those who were "arrested" were actually captured on the battlefield in a foreign enemy land we are at war with under the legal processes natural to a military fighting a war (not civilian police officers).

4. Oddly, the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to them either because they are not uniformed soldiers.

5. They were not properly Mirandized by our military, thus it is not possible to have any resemblance to a normal/ordinary civilian criminal trial anyway without overlooking some normal processes civilians are usually given. The legal proceedings are far too different from a military tribunal to a civilian criminal trial; thus too many things you would normally have to do were not done (and shouldn't have to be done) by the military at the time of their capture (including reading of Miranda rights).

6. Get a liberal judge and a good lawyer, and they will tear this case apart simply on the ways testimony was gathered (compulsion), evidence was gathered, etc. and you'll have almost no choice but to acquit. Not to mention, you'll be inadvertently giving up military secrets along the way that a military tribunal is meant to protect. Bad idea.

If 12 New Yorkers can't find this guy guilty, then I am pretty damn sure he didn't do it. And he will not be realeased in the US, no matter what.

Only 1 juror has to harbor doubt. Not a difficult proposition in this instance. And if he is not found guilty, then what? If not released in America, then where exactly? They say they'll ship him back home, but it isn't up to us. Usually the country of origin doesn't even want them anyway.

And neither was the case for the the unabomber, OKC bombing or any other big trial. This is no different. As for precedent... where do you live that planning (and following thru) to kill thousands isn't already firmly against the law?

Completely different set of circumstances. First, Unabomber was a U.S. citizen. Second, he was not a militant combatant, nor was he picked up by the military, nor was he found in a foreign country. Thus, his capture, the gathering of evidence, his reading of rights -- all took place under the expectation that he would be tried in a civilian criminal courtroom. These foreign terrorists were not.

Oh yeah, the prez was the one prejudging, eh?

You clearly do not understand this enemy at all. I am really very sorry that you don't. I'm not about to make a general statement about all of Islam, but this is radical-extremist-Islam we're talking about. There is no room for peace with them. They will not stop until they have slit your throat and your children's throats and will laugh in your face about it. You might think you are not at war with them, but I promise you they are at war with you. Again, I'm only talking about radical-extremist Muslims, not all Muslims.

Finally, KSM already admitted to doing these crimes so draw your own conclusion.

That is all.

here's the wikipedia definition of a Monarchy:

[falconwolf]

A 'Monarchy' is a form of government in which supreme power is absolutely or nominally lodged with an individual, who is the head of state, often for life or until abdication, and "is wholly set apart from all other members of the state."

That can is applied to a number of people. Hitler was a supreme leader as was Il Duce and Stalin. More recently, Iran has a Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. There are better words than "Monarch" in all these cases. And in the case of Benito Mussolini, Italy had a king while Benito Mussolini ruled, Victor Emmanuel III of Italy.

Falcon

Re:Obama fails again...

[iamhigh]

I appreciate that. I am not some dogmatic jerk who refuses to evaluate my beliefs. Frankly 2,3 and 5 have made me reconsider this. And now I see what that guy meant by precedent; although this precedent is much better than going the other way (civilians tried as military).

Don't be so quick to judge, some people are rational and appreciate meaningful debate.

Re:Obama fails again...

[Bobb Sledd]

It is easy for me to be jaded by those who have their own fast and hardened opinions from missing or wrong information.

I apologize, I was wrong to be so quick to judge you.

You're a breath of fresh air. Most people don't listen to a word I say... or find me incoherent at best :-)