8 ms·

GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes

188 points by rb2e 7y ago

bcherny 7y ago
Any more details on how the encoding worked? Was this just a substitution cypher with some gibberish sprinkled in?
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  Since the article mentions finding duplicate symbols which corresponded to duplicate letters in words, it's probably a simple substitution cipher. Such codes can usually be broken with a combination of frequency analysis, and guesswork. This one was apparently made more difficult by the fact that every other symbol was random. (And apparently using some symbols that did not otherwise appear in the code.)
  - rocqua 7y ago
    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.
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      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.
      - rocqua 7y ago
        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.
        unparagoned 7y ago
        That's not something a normal human would easily think. I doubt an experienced God breaker would have, easily thought your suggestion. But don't worry, go on telling yourself it's something you would have easily thought.
- brad0 7y ago
  Is gibberish called nulls or nonces? I forget.
  - lainga 7y ago
    Those are nulls. Nonces are random numbers for one-time-only use
    - kosievdmerwe 7y ago
      Nonce contains "once", which makes it easier to remember.
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    Nonce is short for "number used only once"
    - herodotus 7y ago
      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."
      - cortesoft 7y ago
        Yeah, I should have said "this is the mnemonic I use to remember what it is"
      - lisper 7y ago
        Also known as a hapax legomenon.
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        I... don't understand how it works. Isn't the Wikipedia page listing these words essentially invalidate their "hapax legomenon" status? Also, GP's "Surfari" doesn't sound like a word meant to be used once, but as a word meant to be funny and with high probability of becoming a piece of jargon between a band of friends. My wife & I invent words like these all the time (half of them being born from misspelling or moments of confusions). Are they "nonces" too, even though we keep using them?
- Zenst 7y ago
  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 two inside triangles are used per character. But certainly highlights how adding noise to any encryption has it's upsides.
  - otwo3 7y ago
    > 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.
    - moomin 7y ago
      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.
paulgb 7y ago
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.
- ozzmotik 7y ago
  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
  - stevenwoo 7y ago
    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 http://www.beingfrankmovie.com/info.html I watched the movie and was shocked to learn the movie was based on a real life phenomena.
    - Joeboy 7y ago
      I don't think the film has all that much to do with Frank Sidebottom, beyond the name and the head. It's more a take on more troubled outsider geniuses like Captain Beefheart and Daniel Johnston. As far as I can tell Chris Sievey was maybe quite eccentric and probably a bit frustrating, but Sidebottom was a piece of art he was doing and not an artifact of mental illness like the film's Frank.
      - branchless 7y ago
        The whole point of the film was that Frank was just talented, with no dark past. His protege assumed dark times were the only true source of talent. His protege was not talented.
    - mcguire 7y ago
      I believe the documentary was the origin of this article.
laurencei 7y ago
"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?
- slededit 7y ago
  I imagine they weren't trying all that hard.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  I doubt and hope that they didn't dedicate a ton of time on the problem. The hint probably just got them there faster.
- rjf72 7y ago
  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.
  - krackers 7y ago
    Does code cracking still work in the era of modern cryptography? I thought that cryptosystems like AES and others were essentially impossible to crack if implemented right. What role do codebreakers play these days?
dlgeek 7y ago
"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...
mellosouls 7y ago
An example of Frank's original worldview. Anybody who's only seen the fictional film representation may find it surprising. https://youtu.be/yrM6sLx_DXo https://youtu.be/yrM6sLx_DXo
keithpeter 7y ago
A couple of quotes from OA with a personal 'translation' "GCHQ told Sullivan that Sidebottom "had a small but dedicated following" among its staff." Couple of people do Sidebottom dialogues as an in-joke to the extent that it begins to annoy co-workers. "[After random outer triangles explained] 'Right, we've cracked it during a light-hearted training exercise.'" Took a couple of minutes as a starter in a session. PS: I use a Playfair style grid to jumble up my pass phrases to try to make them less susceptible to rainbow table attack. Am I wasting my time?
- sjclemmy 7y ago
  Forgive me but; You know you are, you really are.
mmjaa 7y ago
It doesn't matter how cute this story is, I still can't find myself empathising with the contention that GCHQ is anything other than a sinister, totalitarian organisation with the purpose of enslaving us all. The Totalitarian Surveillance State, of which GCHQ is a lynchpin, is not cute, fuzzy, or endearing - in any way. Fluff pieces like this serve to promote the idea of GCHQ as an honourable organisation, when the truth is it is factually a tool of oppression used by the ruling elite to prevent their own usurpation by a revolution of the people. GCHQ is a tool of the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex. Do not glorify its mission, which is to ensure we cannot, as a people, communicate freely without government intrusion.
- F_r_k 7y ago
  What's pharma's implication in gchq?
  - mmjaa 7y ago
    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 were free from such traps, once. https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pharmaceutical-industrial-complex-a-deadly-fairy-tale/15758 https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pharmaceutical-industrial-... EDIT: ask yourself these questions, before you forcibly downvote: Why does the wealthiest nation in the world have the worst health care system of any western nation? Why does the most prosperous nation in the world have a track record of engaging in endless, illegal war? Why is the nation that re-built Europe unable to repair its own infrastructure? Why is it that the people of the wealthiest nation of the world are unable to do anything effective about their own war criminals? The answer: the wealthiest nation in the world is the host to a set of parasites which uses its resources for their own needs: the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex doesn't care about Americans. It cares about world domination through endless war, endless drug addiction and endless possession and subsequent exploitation of other nations' natural resources, and that is precisely what America and its allies are executing.
Hendrikto 7y ago
> I spent a while just looking at them going, 'What could he be saying, what could this mean?' > But it was impossible to crack them […] Confirmed uncrackable. He looked at it Jim, what else was he supposed to do??
ape4 7y ago
I didn't know til now that the GCHQ headquarters is a flying saucer like Apple's

188 points by rb2e 7y ago

bcherny 7y ago

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

LeoPanthera 7y ago
Since the article mentions finding duplicate symbols which corresponded to duplicate letters in words, it's probably a simple substitution cipher. Such codes can usually be broken with a combination of frequency analysis, and guesswork. This one was apparently made more difficult by the fact that every other symbol was random. (And apparently using some symbols that did not otherwise appear in the code.)
- rocqua 7y ago
  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.
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    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.
    - rocqua 7y ago
      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.
      - unparagoned 7y ago
        That's not something a normal human would easily think. I doubt an experienced God breaker would have, easily thought your suggestion. But don't worry, go on telling yourself it's something you would have easily thought.
brad0 7y ago
Is gibberish called nulls or nonces? I forget.
- lainga 7y ago
  Those are nulls. Nonces are random numbers for one-time-only use
  - kosievdmerwe 7y ago
    Nonce contains "once", which makes it easier to remember.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  Nonce is short for "number used only once"
  - herodotus 7y ago
    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."
    - cortesoft 7y ago
      Yeah, I should have said "this is the mnemonic I use to remember what it is"
    - lisper 7y ago
      Also known as a hapax legomenon.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        I... don't understand how it works. Isn't the Wikipedia page listing these words essentially invalidate their "hapax legomenon" status? Also, GP's "Surfari" doesn't sound like a word meant to be used once, but as a word meant to be funny and with high probability of becoming a piece of jargon between a band of friends. My wife & I invent words like these all the time (half of them being born from misspelling or moments of confusions). Are they "nonces" too, even though we keep using them?
Zenst 7y ago
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 two inside triangles are used per character. But certainly highlights how adding noise to any encryption has it's upsides.
- otwo3 7y ago
  > 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.
  - moomin 7y ago
    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.

paulgb 7y ago

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.

ozzmotik 7y ago
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
- stevenwoo 7y ago
  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 http://www.beingfrankmovie.com/info.html I watched the movie and was shocked to learn the movie was based on a real life phenomena.
  - Joeboy 7y ago
    I don't think the film has all that much to do with Frank Sidebottom, beyond the name and the head. It's more a take on more troubled outsider geniuses like Captain Beefheart and Daniel Johnston. As far as I can tell Chris Sievey was maybe quite eccentric and probably a bit frustrating, but Sidebottom was a piece of art he was doing and not an artifact of mental illness like the film's Frank.
    - branchless 7y ago
      The whole point of the film was that Frank was just talented, with no dark past. His protege assumed dark times were the only true source of talent. His protege was not talented.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    I believe the documentary was the origin of this article.

laurencei 7y ago

"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?

slededit 7y ago
I imagine they weren't trying all that hard.
jjeaff 7y ago
I doubt and hope that they didn't dedicate a ton of time on the problem. The hint probably just got them there faster.
rjf72 7y ago
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.
- krackers 7y ago
  Does code cracking still work in the era of modern cryptography? I thought that cryptosystems like AES and others were essentially impossible to crack if implemented right. What role do codebreakers play these days?

dlgeek 7y ago

"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...

mellosouls 7y ago

An example of Frank's original worldview. Anybody who's only seen the fictional film representation may find it surprising. https://youtu.be/yrM6sLx_DXo https://youtu.be/yrM6sLx_DXo

keithpeter 7y ago

A couple of quotes from OA with a personal 'translation' "GCHQ told Sullivan that Sidebottom "had a small but dedicated following" among its staff." Couple of people do Sidebottom dialogues as an in-joke to the extent that it begins to annoy co-workers. "[After random outer triangles explained] 'Right, we've cracked it during a light-hearted training exercise.'" Took a couple of minutes as a starter in a session. PS: I use a Playfair style grid to jumble up my pass phrases to try to make them less susceptible to rainbow table attack. Am I wasting my time?

sjclemmy 7y ago
Forgive me but; You know you are, you really are.

mmjaa 7y ago

It doesn't matter how cute this story is, I still can't find myself empathising with the contention that GCHQ is anything other than a sinister, totalitarian organisation with the purpose of enslaving us all. The Totalitarian Surveillance State, of which GCHQ is a lynchpin, is not cute, fuzzy, or endearing - in any way. Fluff pieces like this serve to promote the idea of GCHQ as an honourable organisation, when the truth is it is factually a tool of oppression used by the ruling elite to prevent their own usurpation by a revolution of the people. GCHQ is a tool of the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex. Do not glorify its mission, which is to ensure we cannot, as a people, communicate freely without government intrusion.

F_r_k 7y ago
What's pharma's implication in gchq?
- mmjaa 7y ago
  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 were free from such traps, once. https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pharmaceutical-industrial-complex-a-deadly-fairy-tale/15758 https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pharmaceutical-industrial-... EDIT: ask yourself these questions, before you forcibly downvote: Why does the wealthiest nation in the world have the worst health care system of any western nation? Why does the most prosperous nation in the world have a track record of engaging in endless, illegal war? Why is the nation that re-built Europe unable to repair its own infrastructure? Why is it that the people of the wealthiest nation of the world are unable to do anything effective about their own war criminals? The answer: the wealthiest nation in the world is the host to a set of parasites which uses its resources for their own needs: the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex doesn't care about Americans. It cares about world domination through endless war, endless drug addiction and endless possession and subsequent exploitation of other nations' natural resources, and that is precisely what America and its allies are executing.

Hendrikto 7y ago

> I spent a while just looking at them going, 'What could he be saying, what could this mean?' > But it was impossible to crack them […] Confirmed uncrackable. He looked at it Jim, what else was he supposed to do??

ape4 7y ago

I didn't know til now that the GCHQ headquarters is a flying saucer like Apple's