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GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

bbc.co.uk

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Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#11

Post by stevenwoo »

ozzmotik wrote: post #10
paulgb wrote: post #7

If Frank Sidebottom is an unfamiliar name, I recommend the short audiobook Frank by Jon Ronson as an entertaining story. Jon played keyboards in his band and is an entertaining writer.

oh wow thanks for sharing that! I had never heard of frank but i definitely have heard of jon ronson from his research and look into psychopathy. oh and the men who stare at goats, of course. anyway i must now add yet another line to my ledger of things i really should be looking into

The movie Frank is a fictionalized version of the character (written by Ronson), and there was a documentary about the guy as well: http://www.beingfrankmovie.com/info.html I watched the movie and was shocked to learn the movie was based on a real life phenomena.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#12

Post by laurencei »

"The country's top codebreakers too seemed flummoxed until Sievey's son Stirling recalled how his dad would get the children to fill an outer row with random symbols, while Sievey would insert real code into the inner row."

Is it really that hard to fool some of the worlds top code breakers, simply by including some random digits?

So a code where every {x} symbol is random, and suddenly you've got an uncrackable code? Surely it cant be that simple?

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#13

Post by herodotus »

cortesoft wrote: post #8
brad0 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is gibberish called nulls or nonces? I forget.

Nonce is short for "number used only once"

A "nonce word" is a word that is created to be used once. For example, if we were surfing off the coast near the Kruger National Park, we might send this tweet: "We are on Surfari!" The wikipedia entry for Cryptographic nonce says: "It is similar in spirit to a nonce word, hence the name."

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#14

Post by slededit »

laurencei wrote: post #12

"The country's top codebreakers too seemed flummoxed until Sievey's son Stirling recalled how his dad would get the children to fill an outer row with random symbols, while Sievey would insert real code into the inner row." Is it really that hard to fool some of the worlds top code breakers, simply by including some random digits? So a code where every {x} symbol is random, and suddenly you've got an uncrackable code…

I imagine they weren't trying all that hard.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#15

Post by jjeaff »

laurencei wrote: post #12

"The country's top codebreakers too seemed flummoxed until Sievey's son Stirling recalled how his dad would get the children to fill an outer row with random symbols, while Sievey would insert real code into the inner row." Is it really that hard to fool some of the worlds top code breakers, simply by including some random digits? So a code where every {x} symbol is random, and suddenly you've got an uncrackable code…

I doubt and hope that they didn't dedicate a ton of time on the problem. The hint probably just got them there faster.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#16

Post by cortesoft »

herodotus wrote: post #13
cortesoft wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonce is short for "number used only once"

A "nonce word" is a word that is created to be used once. For example, if we were surfing off the coast near the Kruger National Park, we might send this tweet: "We are on Surfari!" The wikipedia entry for Cryptographic nonce says: "It is similar in spirit to a nonce word, hence the name."

Yeah, I should have said "this is the mnemonic I use to remember what it is"

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#17

Post by dlgeek »

"I'm embarrassed to say, on the very next day Chris's very own code grid was found in the back of his address book. It was almost like Chris Sievey was going, 'There you go, now we've all had our fun, there's the explanation.'"

And they say the universe doesn't have a sense of irony...

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#18

Post by rjf72 »

laurencei wrote: post #12

"The country's top codebreakers too seemed flummoxed until Sievey's son Stirling recalled how his dad would get the children to fill an outer row with random symbols, while Sievey would insert real code into the inner row." Is it really that hard to fool some of the worlds top code breakers, simply by including some random digits? So a code where every {x} symbol is random, and suddenly you've got an uncrackable code…

Every {x} could be cracked by normal methods if it was simply added as a rule. So let's assume something just barely more sophisticated and we use a nonrepeating function instead of a fixed {x}. For instance, maybe the nth digit of pi means the next n mod 3th digit is random. How would you even begin to crack this? So imagine "thecodeisx". The first digits of pi are 141592653. So we get a noise pattern of: 1, 1, 1, 2, 0, 2, 0, 2, 0. So the code in deciphered format, but with our noise added, could look something like:

tlhpebcokqodengisxf

And keep in mind that is the code before it's enciphered. Even better, the random characters could be not entirely random but rather weighted to try to bring most characters in the message to a roughly similar frequency. So far as I know the primary tool of code cracking is just plain old frequency analysis. Curious if anybody has any proposals on how this would even be possible to crack.

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