First thing people does is feed it into LLM
NSA Codebreaker Challenge 2024
51–60 of 90 posts
Re: NSA Codebreaker Challenge 2024
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
but they generally are not the type to be filtered by an email domain requirement. They are exactly the type to filter by something as "trivial" - 99% of their target audience is Math nerds with .edu emails. The other 1% will go the other 99% of the way to acquire the needed materials to satisfy the target condition. Which in this case, is a room-temperature check compared to the challenges.
I do not think their audience is in fact mostly math nerds.
They hire more Math PhD's than the entire economy combined.
If comparable had happened in any other field, to any other adversary, that very fact would not be as advertised.
Re: NSA Codebreaker Challenge 2024
#53After reading "Permanent Record" by Edward Snowden and "Cult of the Dead Cow" by Joseph Menn, I can't help but feel like the NSA is basically "the bad guys", and I assumed most hackers would feel the same. Are people really excited to do challenges like these for them? I don't mean that in an accusatory way, just genuinely curious as my perspectives (one from a whistleblower and one from 80s hacker culture) are obvio…
I'd recommend reading James Bamford for a more positive look at NSA and their charter...which is essentially math, math, and more math, and unrelated to politics within NSA anyway. The Snowden stuff is extraordinarily excerpted to that which a contractor (Snowden) was seeing in a post 9/11 strange fiasco which did bring politics into play. Bamford predates that mess. Here's a link, for example. https://a.co/d/eMTidtP
NSA is an enormous organization with many chartered activities, some small amount of which involve math, some of which is defensive and benign, some of which is offensive but understandable in the same sense our maintenance of a fleet of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and some of which is probably hard for anybody to get comfortable with (much of which should be halted). A lot of what NSA does is ultra-boring, and some of that should be halted too. Like every major federal government bureaucracy, NSA's most important charter is to secure more budget for NSA (which I maintain is actually an important fact to keep in mind when designing technical security countermeasures).
My point being: be wary of any attempt to characterize NSA in just a sentence or two.
Some of this puts me in mind of people's mental model of NIST as a hive of USG cryptologic activity when it is in reality like 3 very overworked cryptographers and a bunch of project managers. (Someone correct me on this, and then reach out about being on the podcast).
Re: NSA Codebreaker Challenge 2024
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sure you’re aware of this but Snowden wasn’t in the NSA. He worked for a contractor to manage their IT.
He was both! Initially working for a contractor, then for them directly. He may have again gone back to a contractor afterwards.
My understanding is that he worked for some time at CIA, but never directly for NSA.
Re: NSA Codebreaker Challenge 2024
#55After reading "Permanent Record" by Edward Snowden and "Cult of the Dead Cow" by Joseph Menn, I can't help but feel like the NSA is basically "the bad guys", and I assumed most hackers would feel the same. Are people really excited to do challenges like these for them? I don't mean that in an accusatory way, just genuinely curious as my perspectives (one from a whistleblower and one from 80s hacker culture) are obvio…
I would love to hear more about how Menn's book about a clique of nerdy teenagers shaped your opinion of NSA. (Some of those nerdy teenagers are friends of mine; we were nerdy teenagers of the same vintage. I'm not dunking on them.)
Re: NSA Codebreaker Challenge 2024
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was both! Initially working for a contractor, then for them directly. He may have again gone back to a contractor afterwards.
My understanding is that he worked for some time at CIA, but never directly for NSA.
It doesn't matter which 3 letter agency is violating the constitution. They all need to stop.
Re: NSA Codebreaker Challenge 2024
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not think their audience is in fact mostly math nerds.
They hire more Math PhD's than the entire economy combined. If comparable had happened in any other field, to any other adversary, that very fact would not be as advertised.
I do not think this is even close to true.
Re: NSA Codebreaker Challenge 2024
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not think their audience is in fact mostly math nerds.
They hire more Math PhD's than the entire economy combined. If comparable had happened in any other field, to any other adversary, that very fact would not be as advertised.
“They hire more math people then anyone” and “they mostly don’t hire math people” aren’t logically inconsistent.
And the former is similarly not evidence that they mostly hire people with edu emails.
Re: NSA Codebreaker Challenge 2024
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you need HN commenters just to bypass the signup, you will not have a good time in the challenge :P
Just because it's a computer security challenge doesn't mean you should start breaking into the website before the challenge begins. That's akin to suggesting that boxers who were deemed not to qualify for a competition should punching the referee to prove otherwise; what's normal inside the sport can be entirely unacceptable outside it.
If you don't have a family, the Air Force won't let you fly a plane.
You think being Omni-potent in a modern world wouldn't bring its own shade of problems?
It's more akin to the boxers who were deemed not to qualify cuz their deemed arbitrarily too old remind the judges of their youth, all in good fun.
If you cannot get access to an @edu email for long enough to verify a 2FA between Facebook familiarity and now, you likely aren't of the caliber outside of the domain specialty that can be entrusted with that magnitude of information.
Re: NSA Codebreaker Challenge 2024
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
They hire more Math PhD's than the entire economy combined. If comparable had happened in any other field, to any other adversary, that very fact would not be as advertised.
“They hire more math people then anyone” and “they mostly don’t hire math people” aren’t logically inconsistent. And the former is similarly not evidence that they mostly hire people with edu emails.
It is.
PhD's in Math are very rare, and uneconomic. Aside from Wall Street and Langley, no one outside of SV Talent recruits are paying for someone who has spent their prime thinking years considering the viability of certain types of "up-my-sleeve" numbers - no one else has that capital for specialty, almost certainly fruitlessly, since infosec advantage isn't sum-net-zero. Any APT that will pay will have a slight advantage; that opportunity cannot be simply absconded.
That is why NSA skews the average with their hiring practice, let alone indirect contractor influences - although the pure math SME's are held tighter to the chest than even private contractors can boise.
> aren’t logically inconsistent.
Sure, if you remember PhD's in Ecliptic Curve Cryptography or Number Theory or applied but pure 'XYZ' field of promising arcane mathematics are extraordinarily rare, and skew towards a certain demographic as well. The motivated, undeterred, socially-inept few.
And the former is similarly not evidence that they mostly hire people with edu emails.
As the excellence required increases, the numbers get low enough, you can hire ALL the talent. And have enough 'explanatory' budget left over for institutional-preserving things and normal bureaucratic neo-con noise.
You can hire more Math PhD's than anyone, and still mostly not hire math people.
There are very, very few Math PhD's that can, even theoretically, threaten the current risk portfolio of our nation. But if they even did exist, you would not want to signal them out by being the only one they hired.
All signals require noise. Work cannot be performed absent a temperature gradient.