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Contest To Crack William Gibson Poem Agrippa

Posted by Unknown on from the brought-to-you-by-lisp dept.

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.

16 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Well , I looked at it twice... by Viol8 · · Score: 4, Informative

    ... and it was still the same. Perhaps the 1992 tech doesn't work in my shiny new HTML5 browser? ;o)

    1. Re:Well , I looked at it twice... by SJHillman · · Score: 5, Informative

      Crappy summary. The poem is not self-encrypting, rather a program displays the poem once and then encrypts it... it's that program that needs to be cracked. As far as I can tell, the poem itself is just a MacGuffin

    2. Re:Well , I looked at it twice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The summary isn't clear. The posting on the web is just the text of the poem. Per the original linked-to summary:

      While the text of William Gibson's elusive electronic poem AGRIPPA is widely posted around the Web, it has not been seen in its original incarnation — custom-built software designed to scroll the poem through a single play before encrypting each line with an RSA algorithm — since 1992.

  2. And when they're done here by jxander · · Score: 5, Funny

    The next challenge is decrypting Finnegans Wake.

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    1. Re:And when they're done here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I did that once.

      I ended up with a Tale of Two Cities. Typo in the first sentence, "blurst" of times for some reason.

    2. Re:And when they're done here by Verdatum · · Score: 5, Funny

      You stupid monkey!!

  3. Losers will receive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    2 copies of every published Gibson book.

  4. "win a copy of every published Gibson book"?? by KrazyDave · · Score: 5, Funny

    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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    1. Re:"win a copy of every published Gibson book"?? by realmolo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's true. I just re-read the "Sprawl Trilogy" in the last couple of weeks, just to see if "Count Zero" and "Mona Lisa Overdrive" were any better than I remember. They weren't. They're tedious-as-fuck.

      "Neuromancer" is great, but Gibson went up his own ass after that.

      Still, he wrote "Neuromancer", which gets him a lifetime pass.

  5. I've cracked it by mmarlett · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."

    1. Re:I've cracked it by JustOK · · Score: 5, Funny

      Be sure to salt your Crypto-routine

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      rewriting history since 2109
  6. So in other words... by TeknoHog · · Score: 5, Funny

    They want you to hack the Gibson.

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  7. Not encrypted by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    Better known as 318230.
    1. Re:Not encrypted by zamboni1138 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      A large portion of the disc (exactly 8,000 contiguous bytes) has been rewritten with only four different bytes: 0x41, 0x43, 0x47, 0x54.

      Aren't those hex for ASCII characters A, C, G and T? Isn't that the same four characters that are used in DNA sequences?

  8. Re:What were security standards like in '92? by djl4570 · · Score: 5, Informative

    DES is 56 bits and has been around since the seventies. Early browsers from c1995 used 64 bits because anything more required export licenses. That's what got Philip Zimmerman in trouble back in 1994 when PGP was first posted to boards and online services. Given that Gibson is a futurist he might well have used an early implementation IDEA which was first described in 1991 and is 128 bits.

  9. Boring, though, isn't it? by eyenot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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