Cracking Crypto To Get Into College

Kallahar writes "New Scientist is running a story about a Canadian university who had students break an encrypted message in order to get into college. A good idea to grab a good student, but here in 'Free' America these kids would have been thrown in jail for violating the DMCA ..."

Re:The DMC is bad enough - you needn't make stuff

[jockm]

shut up timothy - the DMCA doesn't apply when the copyright holder asks you to break the encryption.

It is worth pointing out that Timothy isn't the one who made that comment. It was the submitter, Kallahar...

Re:The DMC is bad enough - you needn't make stuff

[haruharaharu]

You mean like when Professor Felten was threatened because he met the challenge to break SDMI?

Proffesor Felten was threatened when he attempted to publish his results - The specific charge, as I recall, was distribution of a circumvention device. This is different, one notable difference being that most universities won't try to sue you for entering their contest.

the details

[Syre]

The cryotography turns out to have been very trivial. Here [uleth.ca] are the details.

Re:The DMC is bad enough - you needn't make stuff

[themassiah]

He wasn't threatened when he broke it or because he broke it. He was threatened because he was going to do the un-American (un-Corporate?) thing and turn down the money instead to publish a paper on the subject [which he subsequently did present].
Disclosure of procedure is different than just doing something.

Link to puzzle

[mattvd]

Here's a link to the puzzle from the college's website [uleth.ca]:

http://www.whatmagnet.com/gofigure/index.html [whatmagnet.com]

not really OT

[NightHwk1]

This reminds me of the Try2Hack [try2hack.nl] website.. It consists of 10 or so challenges, each one harder than the previous, involving html/javascript, java, vb, packet sniffing, etc.

It would be great to see something like this as a final exam for anyone studying networks or security.

Article was short on details

[dytin]

The New Scientist article was really short on details. Anyway though, I found the university's press release, which has much more details. It can be found here. [uleth.ca] This link also contains the actual puzzle in case anyone is so inclined to try to break it...

That was simple

[ipfwadm]

All the code is is the index of the letters of the alphabet in base 4. There's a URL underlined in there that makes it really obvious what the "encryption" technique being used is.

Re:the code

[mliu]

SPOILER ALERT

Heh, they can call it encryption if they want, but this is encryption on the same scale as ROT-13. The message is encoded in the Base-4 number system with each number being the alphabet's letter's numerical position. so a = 1, z = 26. Or encoded, a = 001, z = 122.

And like numerous people have pointed out, while this contest in itself can't lead to a DMCA violation, the sad thing is, a piece of software "encrypted" with this algorithm could.

=)

[Anonymous Coward]

to win a scholarship
from the university
of lethbridge

do the math.

formula:

find the sum of all decimal
digits appearing in the natural
numbers from one to one million
inclusive.

contest entries must be
received by december 12/31/01

to enter online: visit
www.uleth.ca
and submit your
answer.

mail: send your answer, along
with your name, full address and
phone number to go figure what
magazine, 108,93 lombard avenue,
winnipeg, mb, r3b3b1.

Re:Doesn't make you a good student

[nathanh]

I'm no genius but it took me 30 seconds to decipher the code. It's base 4 with the letters numbered consecutively.

Wow.. I actually graduated from that University...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who would have thought the little University I went too would turn out a totally unique and creative idea such as this... :)

Speaking from experience, the CS courses there rival many of the larger Canadian Universities, and actually exceed them. If that's one thing the UofL teaches you, it's how to critically think, and code.

Sweet!

Re:The DMC is bad enough - you needn't make stuff

[Danse]

I doubt they even bothered to copyright it.

Anything you write is automatically copyrighted. You don't have to register it or anything anymore.

Spoiler

[Tungz10]

The digits 1-9 appear an equal number of times from 1 to 999,999. That is, if you write out all the numbers in a vertical column, each column will have 100,000 1's, 100,000 2's, etc, except in a different order which doesn't matter.

The sum of 1 to 9 is 45. so the sum of each column is 45 * 100,000 = 4,500,000. There are six columns of digits, so multiply that by six to get 27,000,000. Now add the sum of the digits of 1,000,000.

The answer: 27,000,001

Re:Man, this is easy

[Malc]

Getting into and going all the way are completely different stories! Some universities have lower entrance requirements, but are much tougher later on.

From my experience: I went to UEA. I chose them because at the time, they had the best N. American exchange program. York and Lancaster also had programs, but not as good. Cats college in Cambridge told me I could do an exchange, but I would have to set it up myself. That and their requirement of an A in Further Maths A-Level on top of A's in Maths and Physics (and not Geology which I was really good at) made me decide on Norwich ;)

My exchange year was spent at Carleton University in Ottawa. That place has the rep. of being second to Ottawa University (like a poly), but also for having really low entrance requirements. It was much harder for those people to get into the second year. Take it two ways: 1) they give people a chance who have failed to get in elsewhere; 2) they're money grabbing b******s who will let in anybody, take their mullah and not give them a degree ;)

The work was different than at a British university, but not necessarily to a lower standard. To be good at a British university required excessive reading around a subject. Being good at the Canadian one required working excessively hard, even if the work was not immensely challenging (try doing 4 or 5 courses in one semester with 5 one week projects for each). I did learn some good transferable skills at Carleton (e.g. OO), and take some of the main courses needed for my BCS (???) accreditation (as if anybody in the real world cares about that). They were way ahead of UEA in the OO department - e.g. UEA moved from structured programming to OOP the year after I came back by switching to teaching C++ instead of Modula-2 to the 1st year students.

Re:The DMC is bad enough - you needn't make stuff

[digitalunity]

Y'all are freaking retarded. If there is anything that the Skylarov(sic), the copyright holder doesn't have to grant the Government permission to charge someone with a crime. The DMCA is very much a Criminal law as much as a Civil law. Even after adobe backed out, he still got charged for the crimes committed. In this case, I doubt anyone would get charged. Doesn't mean it couldn't or wouldn't happen.

Wasn't all that hard.....

[sonicsft]

I'm a senior in highschool and I "cracked" the "code" in about 6min....The hardest of the whole thing was running find and replace for their base 4 alphabet(I was too lazy to write a script for it), and then punching some numbers into my scientific calculator. I wish some US schools would do this, then maybe I could afford to go to the schools I get accepted to.....

-sonicsft

NSA Problems

[SkewlD00d]

The NSA [nsa.gov] has some fun problems on its USA Mathematical Talent Search (USAMTS) [nsa.gov] page.

2^(2^(2^2 + 1) - 1) - 1 = 2^31 - 1: Mersenne prime

Re:Disclaimer?

[Arandir]

All he'd need is a valid disclaimer. If he is creating his own crypt method then he just needs to say that it's ok to break it. Surely?

Do any of you guys try to find stuff out on your own, or do you just regurgitate the shit that Slashdot feeds you.

The DMCA is about copyright, not about decrypting a message in base four. Geez. If Adobe (as just a hypothetical example) decided to encrypt their PDF files in base four, then it would be illegal to decrypt those files. But it would NOT be illegal to decrypt any non-PDF base four encodings. The DMCA is Evil enough without you inventing yet new Evils for it.

In summary, no one needs any damn disclaimer to use base four (or rot13). Get real.

Re:Ok, I was bored.

[raoulortega]

You summed the series, but that's not what's being asked. You are supposed to sum the digits

For a series that would be

(n + 1) * (n / 2)

The answer is (45 * (10 ^(n-1)) * n) + 1 where n is the power of ten, 6 in this case.

Re:..Minus the slashdotisms

[lewkor]

I graduated from the University of Lethbridge in Dec 1992. I remember Dr. Holtzman well. He was a very fair prof who made the students work for their grades.

It is a small undergraduate university and unless its grown tremendously since I left one hundred students would be a huge increase in enrollment for the department of compting science. Intro courses in math had maybe 50-60 people and my compiler construction class had only 8 people in it!

There was equal emphasis on theory and practical application. One downside was that the school could not afford any sexy hardware, but that is not as important as learning the basics in my opinion. Nor did it have a Electrical Engineering department. I would like to have learned more about hardware and that's the only difference that I notice when comparing myself to the tech people that I meet where I live now (Calgary, Alberta).

The University of Lethbridge is a particularly good place to go for a science degree because the work that is usually left to grad students at larger institutions is sometimes done by eager undergrad students. I had one friend who had his name on a paper accepted to an academic journal while he was in his forth year of chemistry.

Macleans, a national news magazine similar Time or Newsweek, rates the canadian universities each year. The University of Lethbridge rates just behind the bigger canadian universities like Waterloo, University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, McGill etc.

Makes me almost miss the place. Almost! :^>

The answer is 27,000,001

[The Smith]

Using a combination of C, fold, shell and grep, I can confirm that this (27,000,001) is correct.

This is a harder problem than you might think, but it's not helped by the idiots who can't even understand the question and try to add the numbers 1 to 1,000,000.

Re:The DMC is bad enough - you needn't make stuff

[delcielo]

First, Professor Felten WAS NOT PROSECUTED FOR BREAKING THE ENCRYPTION. He faced prosecution for publishing and presenting his work. That is a HUGE distinction. Obviously, it's something I still disagree with; but it's important to get the facts right.

Second, it may be feasible that a college student could be charged with something under the DMCA if the university got some bug up its arse over him/her; but it would require an idiot of a prosecutor. The university invited the act, and it would end up much as if they had hired the kid to break into their own office as a test of security. Weird things happen, so I'd never say never; but let's try to show a bit more reason.

Stop it!

[Tom7]

The DMCA is a bad law, but it does NOT prevent anyone from doing cryptography or breaking it. It ONLY applies to circumvention of access control to a COPYRIGHTED WORK. It is copyright law, not encryption law.

I think slashdot is perpetuating misunderstanding about this law, and I think that hurts our cause. Being informed is the first and most important step. Otherwise, we are just clueless zealots.