FBI Issues Code Cracking Challenge

coondoggie writes to tell us that the FBI has issued another cracking challenge for a new cipher on their site. Tens of thousands responded to a similar challenge last year. In addition to the challenge, the FBI is also offering a few primers on the subject. There are a number of sites offering cipher challenges, but it's funny to see the FBI encouraging such behavior.

Harry you?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Houdini was always searching for better, more clever ways to perform escape acts and illusions. After he would debut a new trick, others would immediately try to emulate the trick. The trick was on them, though, because Houdini would frequently expose their methods (because it was originally his) and prove himself to be the true master magician.

No difference here. Just the FBI gauging the abilities of the community.

Re:Harry you?

[Architect_sasyr]

Or maybe looking for recruits? I'd imagine that if you're an American then working for some agency which will go un-named you would be earning a stack of money, and if you're a foreign national then they're going to set you up with a visa and a passport and some covert operation to fly your geeky self into the United States. Thus maintaining the "best of the best" cryptographic team, or at least trying to.

Hate to see what happens to the guy who finds the flaw and then says "Sorry, I want to work for [the Chinese]"...

A similar challenge for linux web servers...

[lamapper]

Reminds me of a security company that issued a hacking / cracking challenge somewhere between 3 and 8 years back, no way could I find this article...perhaps one of your ./ will provide a link...

The company offered over $10,000.00 for not only hacking and cracking their server, but showing the company how they did it.

If memory serves (and it sometimes does not) they paid out the first and second years of the challenge, but in year three no one successfully broke into their web server environment.

I believed they kept eliminating modules that had holes and were not needing and closing holes in modules that were needed.

Based on what I read, they were able to 100% successfully secure their web servers from attacks only because they were using Linux as the OS.

I remembered comparing their results with others attempts with other operating systems and really wanting to learn Linux.

Now that I am using Unix and Linux and have a better understanding of what they were doing I can see the simple genius in such challenges.

Whether just for security or for scouting talent, whatever their reasons, its money well spent when they offer cash prizes to the few that are successful!

FBI as code crackers?

[girlintraining]

Oh, come on. This is from an organization that cut funding for terrorism just before 9/11 to add resources to software piracy. Do you really think if they had the brains do do cryptanalysis they'd...

oh wait.

I suppose they are looking for brains, huh.

FBI uses open source software

[root777]

Interesting that FBI uses plone as their CMS and not Wordpress and they have IE compatibility CSS code like the rest of the planet.
Clue: Is there a reason why they have the crypto code displayed as a flash file and not a simple png or jpeg file?

what it should be

[overcaffein8d]

what it should be:

coondoggie writes to tell us that the FBI has issued another cracking challenge for a new cipher on their site. Tens of thousands responded to a similar challenge last year. In addition to the challenge the FBI is also offering a few primers on the subject. There are a number of sites offering cipher challenges, just funny to see the FBI encouraging 4J58I4JTK5NRO4844/4534852WDVJRIN67/368RB8XC0GJFNFXVXCVJVXV8R/GE8F/RETWQ8ER8WRHQ98CVUXHE8V09E8Q/WRWE8Q7T-E8THQEW/CHICKEN438R8SDFUEFNX7/4UDFJD7FH47FHEFT28FHEW6DFT

Re:This will really piss of the Chinese

[Sockatume]

It'll really piss off the NSA (or other TLA) if it turns out that the computer science discoveries made by the competitors transfer to encryption systems they use.

Re:Harry you?

[failedlogic]

It wouldn't be a far stretch of the imagination that the FBI would highly consider those that have applied to Intelligence organizations but didn't make it. Doesn't mean they are less talented at their jobs. There's all kinds of reasons to choose the FBI over some of the others - there's always +/- trade-offs.

Re:Link to the 2008 challenge

[wxwz]

tr '[abcdefghijklmnoqstvwyz]' '[fideltybravngchkopsuwm]'

Interestingly there appears to be a hidden message within the key itself, the start obviously encodes: fidelIty bravERy InTEgRITY, but not sure what the rest works out to (chkopsuwm).

I noticed there was a similar pattern in the 2007 challenge, with the key (fedralbuoinvstgchrkmpvwxyz) starting off with letters encoding 'federal buro of investigation'.

Re:Easy.

[Dice]

I actually started working on it with tr but then decided that I didn't want to bother with counting character placements to be sure I got it right. With sed I could just tack on extra '-e's as I deduced substitutions.

Re:Harry you?

[JWSmythe]

    Years ago, I caught my girlfriend's daughter passing ciphered messages between her and friends. I wasn't trying to punish her, but I wanted to educate her. I explained how they're easily crackable. She wasn't even using letters. They were all symbols of all different kinds. Some were similar to runes. Others simple shapes and variations. It was good for a kid. :)

    I told her what she was doing right, and what she was doing wrong. She said I couldn't crack her message. I asked if there was anything I shouldn't see in it, and she said it was ok. I'm nosy, but I'm not so impolite to look at her private notes. I then walked her through cracking her own message.

    I would hope that the FBI could give us something a little harder than a basic cipher. zzz. boring. At least the daughter's cipher was entertaining. :)

The greeks would be proud.

[scan-alias]

The FBi issues a code to be cracked with the simplicity of a 3 on a scale of 1 to 100 in terms of advanced technologies used in current cryptography. HAha - / they aren't looking for the 99% of society that can figure out the simple sub ciPher. Food for thought: With present technology in cryptography pushing the upper maxim of what we as a species are capable of understanding (in terms of entropy of data with a key) - lets just say someone went another direction. Intelligent "believable" misinformation is more powerful than anything else that could be devised in the world of intelligence. What would be the impact in the world of hidden secrets if an algorithm could encrypt a paragraph of data into an output resembling a ciphered textual paragraph instead of just random letters? Example 1: Paragraph A is encrypted .. instead of yielding random chaotic letters it yields a paragraph of of completely different content/context. How? Take 100 characters - First, these aren't words but 8 bit vectors of data. How do you you transpose 100 8 bit vectors into 100 other 8 bit vectors - the answer: very carefully and with a map along the way of course (the key). Yes it's 100% possible. Example 2: Take it a step further and instead of encrypting into another paragraph. Yield a paragraph that is ciphered with a determined amount of complexity. What would be the advantage of having a barely breakable code, yield a cipher that wasn't just mono-interpretive? Pretty powerful. The trojan horse of modern crypto-design? or just the fbi spending time putting up a code that I could break when i was 5?

Motivation=mens rea; demonstration=actus reus

[KudyardRipling]

This contest is nothing more than a fishing expedition to see those who are smart enough to break codes and brazen and stupid enough to have the testicular resources to demonstrate the same in public.

File under the heading "Let every flower bloom".

Sting?

[kpainter]

Maybe this is like those stings where the police dupe some idiot criminals to show up somewhere under the guise of getting some free stuff, then slap the cuffs on 'em. Are they logging the IP of people who go to that website which in turn is compared against a list of people they want to talk to? Why else would they do something like this?