Enemy Code Broken 137 Years Late 61
Random Hall writes "Dr. Kent Boklan, a former NSA employee and current Director of Security Research for Razorpoint Security Technologies, has described how he recently deciphered a message encrypted by Confederate Army General Edmund Kirby Smith on 14 September 1862."
Insensitive clod (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Insensitive clod (Score:1)
At least.... (Score:1)
Well, technically, it was broken during the war (Score:5, Interesting)
Cryptanalysis is, informally, the study of turning other peoples' "harmless mistakes" into "catastrophic errors". (Incidentally, this Confederate document got broken because they stored the cyphertext with plaintext which contained a sliver of the plaintext that was encoded, allowing the analyst to do a known-plaintext attack on the cypher. Thats also a boo-boo.)
The Codebreakers (Score:2)
The James Bamford books, in comparison, are bland, political, and legalistic. Not a good read at all.
But yes, you're right. The Achilles' Heel of any cryp
I second the recommendation (Score:2)
But in my poor opinion, the supreme Holy Writ of the history of cryptology is The Codebreakers by David Kahn
Absolutely. Kahn's book is comprehensive, well-written and excellent. Anyone wanting to learn about the history of cryptology should start there.
Re:Well, technically, it was broken during the war (Score:2)
Re:Well, technically, it was broken during the war (Score:1)
Re:Well, technically, it was broken during the war (Score:2)
Sorry, couldn't resist. It's not every day that that name appears.
Security through obscurity is bad. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's where Enigma failed : it's internal functions were part of the secret. Once captured it could be reverse engeneered (and flaws in it discovered).
Compare to another technology based encoding : PGP, GPG, etc... they all op
Re:Security through obscurity is bad. (Score:2)
Re:Security through obscurity is bad. (Score:2)
I think it's time for me to re-read the non-fiction again when Purple [wikipedia.org] doesn't sound like the right name and Indigo [wikipedia.org] does.
Grammar difference (Score:2)
Also notice that most exploits of Enigma where based around flaws of the device that needed knowledge of internal workings.
Whether this interal were know by doing statistical reverse-engeneering on messages (the feats of Marian Rejewski [wikipedia.org] your refering to), or by getting actual machine (mentionned on the Enigma [wikipedia.org] article, but I don't have specific example), the key aspect is that once the working known, the code can be broken. Keeping
Re:Grammar difference (Score:2)
the exact design of the military machine secret, that was just normal paranoia, not because they knew the crypto was weak once you had the machine.
A standard 3 rotor Eingma has a keyspace of size 6 x 26^6, which in pre-digital computer days looked pretty good.
Re:Grammar difference (Score:2)
The vast majority of cracking enigma messages relied on "cribs", or sloppy handler procedures, like using the equivalent of "qwerty" as a random rotor setting(called "Herivelismus").
This is plain wrong. The Germans always counted on that the a
Re:Security through obscurity is bad. (Score:2)
While there's some truth to this, lack of obscurity is a double-edged sword. If your enemy knows your encryption algorithm, it can attack it from a much better position. How many years has NSA been grinding away at (for insta
Copy-paste Linus' law (Score:2)
"With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow".
If after years of public scrutinity, a very large community of cryptographer consider a given crypto-algo of not being flawed, chances are, that it'll be less flawed than something you secretly put together in hast in some dark and secret bunker.
Concerning the mention of "military-grade"
I mentioned it because most of the time (as proved, for exemple by guillermito [guillermito2.net]), when a program advertise itself as "mi
Re:Security through obscurity is bad. (Score:1)
and so we vote for open sourced systems for encrypted polling machines ;)
amen!
* lon3st4r *
Didn't take that long to break enigma? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's true what they say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's true what they say... (Score:4, Informative)
To summarise it was a known plaintext attack. His signature was EKS, and he signed his signature encrypted. The author worked back from there.
Re:It's true what they say... (Score:1)
Re:It's true what they say... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It's true what they say... (Score:1)
LK
Re:It's true what they say... (Score:3, Funny)
Something's up if the Confederacy was still issuing messages 137 years ago--in 1869, five ears after that little meeting at the courthouse . . .
(yes, the figures come from the article, which describes the letter appearing in a 1999 catalog, which was indeed 137 years after the message. The article then calls it "recently" decoded in a 2006 article.
The ever-alert slashdot editors caught this, of course . . .
hawk
Details... (Score:3, Informative)
It would have been nice if the write-up gave a little more detail. It was encrypted using a Vigenere cipher [wikipedia.org] with a key of "BALTIMORE".
For those too lazy to read the article, here's what the message said:
Re:Details... (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Details... (Score:3, Insightful)
These guys made every mistake in the book. Putting obvious known words in your plaintext "Louisville", "Covington", "enemy" is asking for trouble. There should be a speech code inside the plaintext, one that can be changed from time to time. Use numbers for your places and throw the plan away at the end of the operation.
Given that there was some really good maths being done 137 years ago the crypto these people used is surprisingly poor.
Re:Details... (Score:2)
The telegraph was new technology and it must have taken time to understand its advantages and vulnerabilities. Similar problems accompanied the introduction of radio telgraphy.
Re:Details... (Score:3, Informative)
Their system was numbers up to (I think) 1000,
Sometimes messages were a mixture of clear text and code. One of them (which was meant to be intercepted) ran something like: I am confident of repuls
Re:Details... (Score:2)
Re:Details... (Score:1)
...or maybe that's just what they WANT us to think. [cue ominous music]
-Eric
Re:Details... (Score:2)
Actually, the real problem is that they included the original spaces in the ciphertext. This is basically unencrypted information leaking through. This allowed the analyst to locate the encrypted form of the word "Louisville." It was this one big break that revealed the entire key.
Had the cipher makers not included spaces, and just packed all the words directly together, this attack would not have been so easy. There are other methods for determining the key of a Vigenere cipher, but they are difficult to
Hooray Edmund Kirby Smith! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hooray Edmund Kirby Smith! (Score:2)
This will become a rare occurrence... (Score:2)
relevence? (Score:1)
Re:relevence? (Score:2)
Re:relevence? (Score:2)
Re:relevence? (Score:2)
What do you expect from a bear... (Score:2)
137 Years (Score:3, Funny)
Re:137 Years (Score:2)
The Message (Score:1, Funny)
What they don't tell you... (Score:3, Funny)
(Yes, that is entirely a joke. I still expect to see 15 people asking where I found that information, and not just the ones looking for a +5 Funny. Oh well, such is life.)
Easy solution (Score:4, Funny)
Just write it into the Wikipedia article on the Civil War and tell everyone that's where you found it. Problem solved!
Re:What they don't tell you... (Score:2)
Can you back that up with anything? Or are you just a whale? Because whales spout water, and you're spouting... well, not water. Never mind.
Codes... (Score:1)
This is an interesting book I read recently on Vigenere, RSA, and others: The Code Book [amazon.co.uk]. Good read.
That's funny ... (Score:3, Funny)
Enemy Code, Broken, 137 Years Late... (Score:1)
Cause for termination? (Score:1)