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Contest To Crack William Gibson Poem Agrippa
An anonymous reader writes "A new cracking contest to cryptanalyse a William Gibson poem. The electronic poem ('Agrippa') was written back in 1992 and self-encrypts after being displayed once. The person who successfully cracks the encryption will win a copy of every published Gibson book."
The poem/program binary was recovered in 2008, but it looks like no one has managed (bothered?) to crack the code.
What was the standard length of an encryption key back then?
... and it was still the same. Perhaps the 1992 tech doesn't work in my shiny new HTML5 browser? ;o)
The next challenge is decrypting Finnegans Wake.
This signature is false.
2 copies of every published Gibson book.
There's your problem right there as to why no one has bothered. It's like that old joke - ".... second prize is two weeks in Cleveland, Ohio and the grand prize is one week in Cleveland, Ohio!"
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"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
They want you to hack the Gibson.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
No need for new infrastructure, just post it as a project euler problem and when you "win" the blog/psuedowiki thing has a link to the torrent file for a collection of his books... I've uh, heard, that such a torrent exists.
Seriously though I've also heard second hand that if you really want to piss off Mr Gibson all you have to do it tell him you love his book iconic genre defining cyberpunk book "snowcrash". At least thats what I've heard. If you don't get the joke, if you ask people the name of a cyberpunk author then family feud style 90% of them will say Gibson but if you ask them their favorite cyberpunk novel a majority will say "snowcrash" which was actually written by Stephenson. I like Gibson's novels too, this is just funny how people assume the awesomest book must have been written by the awesomest author.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
MacOS 7 (System 7) apps were 68k, but they were stored as two "forks" - a resource fork (for icons/cursors/windows/menus and 68k code), and a data form (for free-form data - binary, text, or PowerPC code, but I doubt there's any PowerPC in it).
It's kinda interesting the website doesn't link to ResEdit as it's the way to tell if the binary is runnable by MacOS. (ResEdit also has a primitive disassembler for code resources).
And some old Apple documentaiton on how the Mac works would've been valuable as well - MacOS is a pretty strange OS (each resource can be up to 64k in size, and large programs are known to have multiple code segments).
Especially since knowing how the file must look like helps in its decryption since it has to be well-structured.
According to the diff of the disc image before and after the program runs (http://www.crackingagrippa.net/files/agrippa_diffs.txt) it's perfectly clear that the text is not being encrypted. The listing on the left is after the modification, and the listing on the right is the original disc image. A large portion of the disc (exactly 8,000 contiguous bytes) has been rewritten with only four different bytes: 0x41, 0x43, 0x47, 0x54.
Thus a very significant portion of the original information is lost during the "encryption". It sure looks to me like the program merely overwrites the poem portion of the data with one of four randomly selected bytes. The poem, as listed in HTML on the web page, is 9190 characters, which correlates pretty close with the amount of bytes being modified on the disc image.
Better known as 318230.
Perhaps "no one has managed (bothered?) to crack the code" because "The person who successfully cracks the encryption will win a copy of every published Gibson book." Just speculation, being unfamiliar with his work.
I mean, what's to stop a programmer, who isn't necessarily a heady cryptanalyst, from simply reverse-engineering the Mac application and figuring out exactly how it's done without looking at the poem itself (or the encrypted version) at all?
So, this isn't a cryptanalysis contest. It's a reverse-engineering contest. A cryptanalyst isn't given the actual encrypting mechanism, the original, and the cipher all out front and asked for an explanation. They just get the cipher and some reasonable expectation of what the original might possibly contain (the words "fuhrer" or "atom" for example).
So it's kind of boring for me -- a hobbyist with an ardent interest in cryptography -- to bother tackling the problem, when somebody with some familiarity with Macintosh machine language is going to have a severe advantage.
The contest caters to the wrong crowd and packages itself all wrong.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Second prize Is TWO copies of every published Gibson book.
No brain, no pain.
I met the guy who was doing this, and I think it was written in Mac Common Lisp, which obviates any 68k knowledge.
The one thing it does do is change the NMI vector so you can't use the programmer's key to break into it. That was my small contribution. You may be able to bypass this by running it in multifinder, finding the process-specific NMI vector, and restoring it. You may also be able to set a breakpoint when the NMI vector changes and then reset it. It's been a really long time, and I've forgotten how multifinder dealt with the various vectors...but I do remember that they did get swapped out per-process.
I suppose it must refuse to run when it's run off of read-only media. The whole point was to make sure it only ran once then destroyed itself. You could bit copy it onto floppies - I'm not sure how to do that anymore either. Damn, was that was only 20 years ago.
Your quick summary could use a quick summary.