7 ms·
Problems with Bruce Schneier's “Solitaire” (2001)
- elcapitan 10y agoThe Solitaire link in the article doesn't work, so here's a description on Bruce Schneier's website: https://www.schneier.com/academic/solitaire/ https://www.schneier.com/academic/solitaire/
- vmateixeira 10y agoIn my case it's being blocked by BT and redirecting to theirs security and risk management page[0]. [0] - http://www.globalservices.bt.com/uk/en/products_category/security_and_risk_management?cid=(pl)counterpane(cm)redirect http://www.globalservices.bt.com/uk/en/products_category/sec...
- elcapitan 10y agoIs that a block? Just seems to me that this is a fairly old article referencing some other fairly old page, which now probably redirects categorically to that BT page.
- vmateixeira 10y agoYes, I think so. I can see 404s but when it comes to security/encryption links it's not the first time it has happened. I can't access these ones either [0],[1], linked from [2]. [0] http://www.counterpane.com/blowfish.html http://www.counterpane.com/blowfish.html [1] http://www.counterpane.com/bfsh-koc.zip http://www.counterpane.com/bfsh-koc.zip [2] http://bcrypt.sourceforge.net/ http://bcrypt.sourceforge.net/ Edit: I just realised this page belongs to the same domain name as the previous.
- mintplant 10y agoI'm not on BT and I'm getting the same redirects. Looks like Counterpane was acquired [1] by BT in 2006 and became BT Managed Security Solutions [2]. [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/bt_acquires_cou.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/bt_acquires_c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_Managed_Security_Solutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_Managed_Security_Solutions
- vmateixeira 10y agoAlright, thanks for the tip!
- lstamour 10y agoOriginal page works for me in Canada, as a data point.
- taspeotis 10y agoProblems with Bruce Schneier's “Solitaire” (ciphergoth.org) There's no year in the title, which raised my ire. It's an old article. But it's hard to tell how old this article is. The end of the article has an update dated "2001 August 13" and the Last-Modified header is "Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:12:22 GMT".
- tener 10y agoI wonder if Web Archive will be able to tell its age.
- DINKDINK 10y agoWayback machine's oldest archive is February 2002. https://web.archive.org/web/20020220073637/http://www.ciphergoth.org/crypto/solitaire/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020220073637/http://www.cipher...
- vacri 10y agoWhat's with this recent rise of people being angry about titles on HN? I don't recall it being so strong in years gone by.
- taspeotis 10y agoWell I read the article thinking that there might be some exciting new crypto news and then bam! "Update 2001 August 13".
- reitanqild 10y agoBut still, why angry?
- teh_klev 10y agoIt's all about context, in a temporal sense, which I think is important when discussing certain subjects. I don't think GP comes across as "angry", the article title quite rightly should have [2001] tacked on the end.
- exabrial 10y agoAh, so it's confirmed. Bruce is an NSA asset. http://m.slashdot.org/story/193287 http://m.slashdot.org/story/193287
- Animats 10y agoAs a usable cypher, it has some practical problems. If you restart from the same deck for each message, both messages are encrypted with the same key stream. That's easy to break even with just two messages. If you continue to use the deck from its ending state from the previous message, the security is better. But if the recipient ever misses a message, they're out of sync. The usual procedure with progressive key systems like this is to transmit a sequence number at the start of each message which tells the recipient where to start. As a practical matter, people will screw up all that card manipulation. This is a criticism of most paper and pencil systems. In practice, intelligence agencies that use paper and pencil systems need a staff which decodes garbled transmissions, where the key is slightly off. Whether this cypher is any good isn't clear. Work has been done on analyzing it.[1] It's known that there are bad keys, starting decks which lead to a short cycle, and that these are rare. There's a paper on this out of Moscow's Institute of Cryptology, Communication, and Information.[2] Key comment, after they describe what the paper covers: "Methods based on investigation of group or semigroup properties of stream cypher not published in open literature". They're not saying if they can crack it. But they did prove that it's isomorphic to a cypher which is the same except for some modifications which make it simpler. They may have proved that the fooling around with the jokers doesn't help, but I'm not sure. "Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945", by Leo Marks, goes into the practical problems of paper and pencil encryption systems in wartime. The British went into WWII using Playfair, which is a crappy transposition cypher. He converted to a system where long one-time keys were printed on thin silk. This allowed spies to carry lots of keying material in a small space. [1] https://portail.telecom-bretagne.eu/publi/public/fic_download.jsp?id=32899 https://portail.telecom-bretagne.eu/publi/public/fic_downloa... [2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2003/169 https://eprint.iacr.org/2003/169
- zokier 10y agoBut the burning question is that if Solitaire is not good enough, then what is the replacement? I'm not really aware of any beyond simple otp style systems.
- todd8 10y agoThanks for the comments. I thoroughly enjoyed Between Silk and Cyanide. A small correction, the Playfair is actually a substitution cipher (mapping diagrams to diagrams) not a transposition cipher. The Playfair is a paper and pencil cipher that can usually be broken by hand with even modest amounts of material[1]. The Playfair (and the Wheatstone bridge) were invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone. [1] Helen F. Gaines, Cryptanalysis, chapter 21. https://www.amazon.com/Cryptanalysis-Study-Ciphers-Their-Solution/dp/0486200973 https://www.amazon.com/Cryptanalysis-Study-Ciphers-Their-Sol...
- Phemist 10y agoFor my last job interview, I encrypted the plaintext "DO IT" (as in, hire me!) with solitaire. I still remember sitting in the train on my way to the job interview, frantically shuffling cards to generate the ciphertext. My interviewer thought it was a fun gesture and it definitely helped in me landing the job. Had they known about these vulnerabilities in the cypher beforehand, I'm not so sure I would've gotten it. :p
- detaro 10y agoDid they give you that as a preparation task or how did that come up in your interview?!
- Phemist 10y agoI had just finished 'Necronomicon' at the time. I thought I'd do something pro-active and show up with a little thoughtful gift, related to the company's main focus.
- Phemist 10y ago'Cryptonomicon'. Of course..
- empath75 10y agoAlthough the idea of Lovecraftian cryptography is appealing to me.
- zokier 10y agoSummoning an Old One with a deck of cards would have also been really impressive. I would not dare to not hire someone with such skills.
- stcredzero 10y agoCharles Stross has a series of stories that involves people summoning demons and casting magic with computers and nerdy stuff. (The "Laundry")
- j2kun 10y agoCan someone explain what the desired features of a "hand cipher" are?
- brohee 10y agoWell, I would say : - practical (using a manageable amount of paper, and/or common items like a chess board, playing cards or dominoes...) - fast enough (encrypt say at least one word per minute, pretty sure manual RC4 doesn't qualify here) - secure against an adversary using computing ressources - provides a way to easily store a strong key, a shuffled deck is pretty good at this
- pavel_lishin 10y agoI'd add "plausibly deniable" as well - requiring either party to have a copy of "The Lil' Saboteur's Guide To Field Encryption" is probably bad for espionage.
- jhallenworld 10y ago>The CPRNG state machine is not reversible, contrary to what the operational notes claim... >>1. Find the A joker. Move it one card down. (That is, swap it with the card beneath it.) If the joker is the bottom card of the deck, move it just below the top card. (so in reverse: if A is 2nd card you don't know to make it top card or bottom card). This ambiguity could be simply fixed: when you move A down, don't skip the top card, just put it at the top. Similarly for B, count the move from bottom to top as one of the two moves. It seems like you are doing less by not skipping a card, but you do create a new valid configuration, so maybe it does not hurt...