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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.'"
Remember this kids: always use a proper database for your crap encryption scheme.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
that extremists are usually complete idiots.
I would say that once his emails are being read he's screwed. Either he has AES encrypted files which take a lot of expensive equipment to decrypt (and fail to do so in a reasonable time) resulting in lots of surveillance to catch most of the people involved or he forces some poor graduate to use excel and give away the rest of the 'cell'.
I don’t think once your emails are being intercepted you have much hope of carrying out a terrorist attack anyway.
According to Bruce Schneier, there are two types of cryptography - that which will keep secrets safe from your little sister, and that which will keep secrets safe from your government.
I don't think this counts as either.
Fail.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
... everyone knows you don't roll your own crypto.
I guess this is further support for the theory that the ignorant have too much confidence in what they think they know.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
The biggest lol is that it's true.. (see date of original article)
Because if terrorists had a reliable key distribution network, they'd already be an army, not a loosely organized criminal band with minimal transportation infrastructure? One time pads are only as good as your distribution system. And the moment you run out of key bits and reuse them, your system is broken.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
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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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
We should rename encryption "bacon", then they'd never use it.
This just goes to show how the whole Patriot Act has nothing to do with catching terrorists. They can barely communicate effectively, most of them just set their underwear on fire, and the rest live in far off lands, yet the nanny state is always local, ever present, and ever watchful... give me a break!
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I always thought the Excel menu option "terrorist cell" was a bit suspect.
Money for nothing, pix for free
obviously you don't understand jews. We'd still us it, we'd just feel guilty. Our mothers would bring it up everytime we saw them.
...bumblers are so dangerous that we must give up our liberty in order to be safe from them?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
One of my pet peeves, for example. Saudi Arabia does not permit women to drive. Saudi Arabian government has a deficit and it has external debt. Yes it is true. It is so incomprehensible. The oil wealth of Saudi Arabia does not belong to the people of Saudi Arabia. It is considered to be personal wealth of King Saud, and his descendants, about 5000 sheiks and their families. All the rest get some kind of government dole, but pittance compared to what the sheiks are raking in. They have imported some 500,000 drivers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Phillipines (that is in addition to 1.5 million domestic servants).
You can talk till you are hoarse about why women should be allowed to drive their cars, based on principles of equality, or economic implications. You will not make any progress. You cant reach them. They would shut you out.
But, if you knew that Mohammad has ordered all Muslim women to be able to ride horses and camels, you could argue that not allowing women to drive cars contradicts the Hadith, so it is un Islamic. Not that you are going to win. They will come back some argument or another. But they won't be able to shut you out. You will enable a few women there to make similar argument, and who knows, ten years from now, they might relax it a little bit and allow women to drive their sick children to hospitals.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
when it was realized that "Igpay Atinlay" might be incompatible with the Muslim prohibition of pork.
That and you can't really even call it "encryption". This is a "substitution cipher" isn't it? So it's "encipherment", not "encryption"?
Encrypted messages rely on a translation that is relative to character position in the message, such that the substitution of a given letter at one position is usually not the same as the substitution for that same letter at any other position.
Not true: AES will encrypt the same block the same way every time with the same key. AES is typically used in such a way that it produces the results you describe, but the block encyption is still "encryption", whether used sensibly or not.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No, it's the other way around. Believing that the only goal of your life is to please and praise some guy called "The Lord" at any cost, means that you are a horrible person regardless of who "The Lord" is, and if he exists in the first place.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.