Wired tells the
story of an old encoded manuscript, the effort to crack it, and the secret occult society that it revealed.
posted by Ipsifendus
on Nov 17, 2012 -
27 comments
Robert Morris, a pioneer in the field of computer security, early major contributor to the UNIX operating system, and father of Robert Tappan Morris (author of the Morris Worm), has
died at 78.
NYT [more inside]
posted by fireoyster
on Jun 29, 2011 -
23 comments
How To Make Anything Signify Anything "By the time he retired from the National Security Agency in 1955, Friedman had served for more than thirty years as his government’s chief cryptographer, and—as leader of the team that broke the Japanese PURPLE code in World War II, co-inventor of the US Army’s best cipher machine, author of the papers that gave the field its mathematical foundations, and coiner of the very term cryptanalysis—he had arguably become the most important code-breaker in modern history."
posted by puny human
on Feb 4, 2011 -
10 comments
Thomas Jefferson's cipher message from Robert Patterson For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher -- a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.... To Mr. Patterson's view, a perfect code had four properties: It should be adaptable to all languages; it should be simple to learn and memorize; it should be easy to write and to read; and most important of all, "it should be absolutely inscrutable to all unacquainted with the particular key or secret for decyphering." [more inside]
posted by caddis
on Jul 2, 2009 -
22 comments
On May 13, security advisories published by
Debian and
Ubuntu revealed that, for over a year, their OpenSSL libraries have had a major flaw in their
CSPRNG, which is used by
key generation functions in many widely-used applications, which caused the "random" numbers produced to be extremely predictable.
[lolcat summary] [more inside]
posted by finite
on May 16, 2008 -
81 comments
This is an ironic tale of the consequences of inept application of cryptographic tools.
Or is it? Dan Egerstad, a Swedish hacker, gained access to hundreds of computer network accounts around the world, belonging to various embassies, corporations and other organizations. How did he do it?
Very easily: by sniffing exit traffic on his
Tor nodes.
[more inside]
posted by Anything
on Dec 4, 2007 -
27 comments
Secret agent Huub Lauwers was
parachuted into occupied Holland in 1941 to relay intelligence back to London. His capture by the Germans marked the beginning of the
Englandspiel, a deadly game of cat-and-mouse intelligence that cost the lives of over fifty agents. Lauwers frantically tried to inform the
SOE that he had been caught, but the
Baker Street Irregulars just didn't get it. Or
did they? [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Aug 6, 2006 -
16 comments
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posted by Plutor
on Jul 5, 2005 -
69 comments
The Reader of Gentlemen's Mail In the spring of 1919, when the father of American cryptography,
Herbert O.
Yardley, drew up a plan for a permanent State Department codebreaking organization — a "
black chamber — he estimated that a modest $100,000 a year would buy a chief (Yardley) and fifty clerks and cryptanalysts. Yardley rented a three-story building in New York City: on East 38th Street just off Fifth Avenue, he put two dozen people to work under civilian cover—as the
Code Compiling Company. His summary dismissal happened in 1929 at the hand of incoming Secretary of State
Henry Stimson, who closed down the
Cipher Bureau with the
casual observation that "
gentlemen do not read each other's mail". The son of a railroad telegrapher, a man with a lively Jazz Age interest in money, good-looking women, and drinks at five, Yardley not only taught his country how to read other people's mail but wrote two of the enduring American books—the memoir
The American Black Chamber (1931), and
The Education of a Poker Player (1957).
posted by matteo
on Apr 22, 2005 -
6 comments
Rongorongo! Say it twice -- don't it feel nice? Most people think of
the enigmatic maoi when they think of Easter Island but an equally vexing mystery is found in twenty-six wooden objects which contain pictographic symbols comprising...
what? A language? A mnemomic system for recording stories now long forgotten? A resource for modern primitives' tribal tatoos? We could ask, but the
authors are long-gone -- the victims of hard times -- leaving only a few tablets and a bunch of carved stone to puzzle over.
posted by Ogre Lawless
on Jan 19, 2004 -
5 comments
There comes a time when people at a technical conference like this need something more relaxing. A change of pace. A shift of style. To put aside all that work stuff and think of something refreshingly different. So let's talk about coding theory.
posted by thebabelfish
on Oct 25, 2003 -
7 comments
You've probably heard of the WWII
Navajo "code talkers" who managed to baffle crack Japanese cryptanalysts and were credited with enabling US success at Iwo Jima. Civil engineer, journalist and photographer
Philip Johnston was the determined mind behind the "windtalkers". The son of missionaries, Johnston grew up on a Navajo reservation and was one of only a handful of outsiders fluent in the Navajo language. A bit of his background is included
this article, and you can read a
complete history of his plan, view an archive of
photos by Johnston, and see copies of his
enlistment application letter to the Marine Corps commandant, as well as a
recommendation letter from the Commanding General. (more inside...)
posted by taz
on Jan 22, 2003 -
13 comments
AES may have been broken. The new standard in crypto,
AES, and other algorithms, appear to be vulnerable to
xsl. This is not a practical attack, yet, but if you're interested in crypto it's fascinating (and shocking) news.
posted by andrew cooke
on Sep 16, 2002 -
7 comments
Fun with Fingerprint Readers. A Japanese cryptoanalyst recently found that he could reliably fool biometric fingerprint scanners using only gelatin like that found in gummy bears. Not only could he create a fake finger using the original, he was also successful in fooling the scanners based on a gelatin mold of a fingerprint lifted from a piece of glass.
posted by kaefer
on May 15, 2002 -
9 comments
How to Think About Security from Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram. It's a brief discussion with a five point filter to use when evaluating security measures. Good food for thought and best of all, he echos many things I've already spouted off about airport security...
posted by shagoth
on Apr 16, 2002 -
2 comments
Crypto guru getting blamed for his software. PGP writer Phil Zimmermann's hate mail goes a little something like this, "Phil -- I hope you can sleep at night with the blood of 5,000 people on your hands." If Phil is guilty of anything so is everyone who has ever used their credit card online, including Mr. Hate Mail.
posted by skallas
on Sep 21, 2001 -
23 comments
War on Civil Liberties Watch: Usable encryption is in deep doo-doo.
A new poll finds 72% of Americans now supporting a ban on unbreakable encryption. (Apparantly breakable, and thus useless, encryption is just fine.) Besides the obvious fact that this stuff is already out there and cannot be taken back, particularly from non-US citizens who don't give a damn about our laws (such as, say, the exact people we're trying to defeat), is there any hope that the courts will find any such new laws unconstitutional?
posted by aaron
on Sep 18, 2001 -
36 comments
