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GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

bbc.co.uk

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Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#51

Post by otwo3 »

Zenst wrote: post #5
bcherny wrote: post #2

Any more details on how the encoding worked? Was this just a substitution cypher with some gibberish sprinkled in?

Certainly seems that way. How I read "Noticing some repeated pairs of symbols - which represented letters - the first word cracked by GCHQ boffins was Sidebottom's favourite word, "bobbins"." Though two triangles are used per letter - you can check that with one of the examples which has a message "Why does my nose hurt after concerts?" - 37 characters in total (including spaces), then count the triangles - 74. Hence…

> Adding noise to any encryption has it's upsides

That's assuming that the secret is the encryption algorithm itself rather than the key. Modern symmetric encryption does not work that way - the algorithm is public and well known while the key is the actual secret required for encryption/decryption.

I don't see how adding noise in modern encryption can help other than increase the size of the output.

Some modes of operation make use of random noise (IV in CBC, nonce in CTR, etc) because it's a convenient way to get a unique number but it's not for obscurity, it's because it's needed to prevent attacks on these modes.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#52

Post by buu700 »

mattlondon wrote: post #39
cortesoft wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonce is short for "number used only once"

It is also the word for a paedophile which is pretty unfortunate. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nonce

That was confusing for me at first when David Cross was sent to the "nonce wing" in The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret. It seemed like an odd situation to start chatting about crypto.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#54

Post by moomin »

otwo3 wrote: post #51
Zenst wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly seems that way. How I read "Noticing some repeated pairs of symbols - which represented letters - the first word cracked by GCHQ boffins was Sidebottom's favourite word, "bobbins"." Though two triangles are used per letter - you can check that with one of the examples which has a message "Why does my nose hurt after concerts?" - 37 characters in total (including spaces), then count the triangles - 74. Hence…

> Adding noise to any encryption has it's upsides That's assuming that the secret is the encryption algorithm itself rather than the key. Modern symmetric encryption does not work that way - the algorithm is public and well known while the key is the actual secret required for encryption/decryption. I don't see how adding noise in modern encryption can help other than increase the size of the output. Some modes of op…

Look up “confounders”, random noise can be extremely useful if you encrypt it as well. This significantly increases the work required to decrypt (since you’ve got to decrypt random noise as well as signal), makes it much harder to tell if you’ve actually decrypted something successfully (depending on how well you can test the plaintext, obviously) and frustrate correlation attacks because every message has a different payload even if the logical payload was the same.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#56

Post by mcguire »

stevenwoo wrote: post #11
ozzmotik wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe the documentary was the origin of this article.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#57

Post by mcguire »

lisper wrote: post #21
herodotus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Also known as a hapax legomenon.

Which is also a fish creature from the web comic Narbonic.

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#58

Post by lainga »

mattlondon wrote: post #39
cortesoft wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonce is short for "number used only once"

It is also the word for a paedophile which is pretty unfortunate. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nonce

Cue the old protest that "root" means something vulgar in Australia, and so the Unix superuser should be named something else.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/root#Etymology_2

Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#59

Post by sctb »

mmjaa wrote: post #43
F_r_k wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's pharma's implication in gchq?

Big Pharma is another key tool in the oppression of the masses. Big Pharma and Big Military work hand in hand to ensure there are Big Problems for both to solve, keeping us all engaged in a game that is only there so we don't overthrow our true oppressors: Big Industry. Of course, this isn't a popular opinion - everyone loves their socially-approved drug addictions these days. But it wasn't always that way. People we…

We've asked you several times to please not post political or ideological rants here. Could you please review the guidelines and stop? We'd rather not ban the account.

> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, and we ban accounts that do it.

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Re: GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

#60

Post by rocqua »

gmueckl wrote: post #48
rocqua wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like they could've figured that out by simply looking at the distribution of triangles on the inside as compared to the outside.

For that you simply need to have the sudden inspiration of how the scheme works. Snark aside, I don't think that discarding half of the source material as random junk is such an obvious thing to do.

You could easily think, 'hey perhaps the outside triangles are different from the inside ones, lets make a histogram of the symbols in both.'

From there, you'd certainly notice if one side had a lot more symbols than the other side. Trying to analyze both separately is a decent next step, and we are well along to solving this.

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