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Convicted Terrorist Relied On Single-Letter Cipher
Hugh Pickens writes "The Register reports that the majority of the communications between convicted terrorist Rajib Karim and Bangladeshi Islamic activists were encrypted with a system which used Excel transposition tables which they invented themselves. It used a single-letter substitution cipher invented by the ancient Greeks that had been used and described by Julius Caesar in 55BC. Despite urging by the Yemen-based al Qaida leader Anwar Al Anlaki, Karim rejected the use of a sophisticated code program called 'Mujhaddin Secrets' which implements all the AES candidate cyphers, 'because "kaffirs," or non-believers, know about it so it must be less secure.'"
I read this story a few days ago. What strikes me is that I had invented better a encryption scheme when I was 16. See, I had read somewhere that certain letters (such as 'e') show up more times in English than other letters (such as 'x'). I also read that using frequency analysis is one way you can break single letter cipers. So, I did something that I was (was) rather proud of.
I found out the most frequent letters, and instead instead of having single letter ciper, I replaced each one with more than one other character. So, 'e' might have been '6', 'j' and 'q', while 's' in this scheme might have been '3', 'f' and 'o' (or whatever). I was attempting to foil any frequency analysis that someone (who I don't know) might have done on my secret messages.
Only trouble was, the first version of the program had a bug. I think it was underscore was replaced with the wrong character in the decryption phase. Once I caught that though, it was all good.
Of course, a couple of years latter I learnt about PGP and GPG and RSA and all that good stuff. I no longer rely on home-built faulty encryption that requires both parties to have the code to decrypted the message.
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IIRC, they 'layman's historical introduction to cryptoanalysis' type overviews do often mention that more or less the earliest clearly recognizable use of frequency analysis cropped up among islamic scholars working on the problem of separating authentic Muhammad quotations from the assorted non-canon stuff that had crept in, by examining word frequency distributions across different passages...
The guy is a moron no matter who cracked the cipher, of course, because it doesn't really matter who, just whether somebody did or not(excluding the edge cases of certain comparatively modern ciphers, that might conceivably have been cracked in private).
Yeah, one day in undergrad I decided I wanted to make my own polyalphabetic substitution cipher, so I sat down and basically reinvented the Vignere cipher (actually the Gronsfeld cipher, which is identical except that the key is numeric. Also FWIW I was not in a technical major).
This story is made ironic by the fact that the Arabs were responsible for many historic advances in the history of pre-modern cryptography.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Sadly TFA is from March and thus probably not. As someone who has hung around cops at the shop and got them to tell some of their favorite "dumbass criminal" stories this frankly doesn't surprise me, hell let me add one of my favorites the cops told me:
This Einstein, which actually gained a little celebrity by ending up on "World's stupidest criminals" decides he is gonna rob this bank so he comes up with the cunning disguise of a bag over his head while wearing his work shirt with the company and his name in bold letters on the front. Not only that but he writes the note on a personal check he left behind at the scene! The cop I was talking to was one of the arresting officers and he had to let his partner do the talking during the arrest he said because he was too busy laughing at the criminal who was damned sure his disguise was perfect! He argued with them all the way to the station that there was NO WAY they could have seen him through the bag!
So a terrorist group with the brains of a bag of rocks really doesn't surprise me. from talking with the cops that come in my shop one thing I've learned is that for most crimes you sure as hell don't need Colombo, because the criminals make Homer Simpson look like Stephen Hawking.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Being a terrorist grunt is a sucker's game.
Being a terrorist leader, on the other hand, is pretty much a combination of the best parts of being a cult leader and being an extreme sports enthusiast: Groupies, adulation, adrenaline, explosions, sponsors, probably more burqa-babes than you admit to in public...