10 ms·

If your cipher were secure, this image wouldn't have repeating patterns (2015)

210 points by EthanHeilman 7y ago

jascii 7y ago
Thanks for that rabbit hole! See also: https://github.com/mmcc1/crystalline https://github.com/mmcc1/crystalline http://maldr0id.blogspot.com/2015/05/crystalline-cipher-and-cryptography.html http://maldr0id.blogspot.com/2015/05/crystalline-cipher-and-... The authors inability to take any criticism is stunning, sometimes I wonder if a fragile ego isn't one of the greatest barriers to cyber security..
- asudosandwich 7y ago
  What if he’s not meant to be read in good faith?
- thethirdone 7y ago
  From the github README: > Designed to be as secure as a one-time pad, without a weakness due to the use of repeating keys, That immediately shows that the person writing it doesn't know cryptography. You simply can't get the security of one-time pad without having a key the size of the data, and if you do, just use it as the pad.
  - cryptonector 7y ago
    And you can't reuse the keys in a one-time pad system.
    - jascii 7y ago
      Lol, I always wondered what the "one-time" bit meant ;)
    - klingonopera 7y ago
      Nitpick: You can, but you shouldn't.
      - jascii 7y ago
        Nitpick: the moment you do, it stops being a one-time pad.
        klingonopera 7y ago
        I've always wondered if the assumption, they're never using the same one twice, would suffice to practically always use the same one then (assuming data-length never changes).
        alecbenzer 7y ago
        Not sure what you're asking? If you use the same key over and over again, then you're using the same key much more than just twice. The idea of a one-time-pad is that you're basically just randomly flipping the bits of your input, which means the output of an OTP cipher is indistinguishable from random data. If you're using the same key multiple times though, then the output of the cipher (considered over time) won't be random, and you'll be able to detect patterns from the original input in the cipher output (e.g., the shape of an image, frequency of certain letters).
        klingonopera 7y ago
        The output is always random, regardless how often the key has been used. The thing is, if you know the same key has been used a second time, then yes, having both outputs (can? will? must? could?) helps to acquire the key. But how do you know they're using the same one? Or how are you sure, they're not? All you have, are two pieces of random data.
        alecbenzer 7y ago
        > The output is always random, regardless how often the key has been used. The output of any _one_ use of the pad is, yes, but the point is to consider all of the data that an attacker may have. If you re-use the key multiple times, then the entirety of the cipher texts an attacker has is not random. (See also: https://xkcd.com/221/ https://xkcd.com/221/) > But how do you know they're using the same one? Or how are you sure, they're not? You'll be able to tell because you'll see patterns in the data: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Tux_ecb.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Tux_ecb....
  - Someone 7y ago
    There’s also the claim > Crystalline employs information loss as the basis of its security. If encryption loses information, there’s no way decryption can bring it back. In the extreme def encrypt(s): return “(TOP SECRET)” is totally secure, but also totally useless.
    - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
      Not useless. This is, in fact, the most widely used encryption algorithm in declassified government documents! /joke
    - khazhoux 7y ago
      Not totally useless. You just need the dual: def decrypt("(TOP SECRET)"): return s
      - alexeiz 7y ago
        I know how to fix it. Blockchain!
    - dreamcompiler 7y ago
      I noticed this too. One of two things is going on: a. The author cannot decrypt it either, unless he's cheating somehow, or b. It's not really losing information and the author is lying.
  - infinity0 7y ago
    >> Designed to be as secure as a one-time pad, > That immediately shows that the person writing it doesn't know cryptography. You simply can't get the security of one-time pad [..] Talking about a one-time pad at all in the context of making something actually secure for internet usage, shows that the talker doesn't know about cryptography. A one-time pad having "perfect security" is only true in the context of a particular security model that doesn't generally hold true on the internet - one where the adversary cannot change the ciphertext whilst it is in transit. Under a more realistic security model, we need a message authentication code or some other equivalent, to protect against adversaries changing the ciphertext. It's a well-known theorem of modern cryptography that in fact if you don't have secure authentication under this model, then you cannot achieve secure privacy. In other words, your ciphertext has to be bigger than the plaintext for security on the internet. (There is in fact a one-time-pad equivalent for MACs where your key is the length of the plaintext and the ciphertext ends up being several multiple times the length of the plaintext, but crackpots when making security arguments about "one-time pads" generally aren't referring to this and aren't even aware of the existence of this. It's a relatively unknown construction and nobody really talks about it in the context of serious modern cryptography.)
    - scolby33 7y ago
      What is the MAC-like construction for an OTP cipher?
      - fdupress 7y ago
        One-time MACs... The most widely used constructions are based on polynomials: GHASH (from GCM) and Poly1305.
- cryptonector 7y ago
  This happens with some regularity in the crypto scene. Someone comes up with a cipher and they think it must be awesome! because they came up with it. Not being cryptographers, these ciphers always fall quickly, then the authors get defensive. I want a doll with Alan Turing's likeness that says "cryptography is hard" when you pull the cord.
  - jascii 7y ago
    Cryptography is hard enough when using proven algorithms..
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      I remember on an old crypto mailing list some lowly PHP programmer asking if instead of a grab bag of primitives there was some library where he could just encrypt/decrypt a random object. Without having to build a Frankenstein thing out of random cryptographic parts. Everyone peed on him and he never came back. The poor sap was right though. The proven algorithms tend to fail catastrophically when used or implemented incorrectly.
      - larzang 7y ago
        Ironically now PHP is one of the few high-level languages doing this right, with built-in libsodium support and an excellent idiot-proof library available in Halite on top of that.
        jjeaff 7y ago
        Agreed. And it even has a global you can use for the cipher that is updated along with the php version.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    “Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break.” — Bruce Schneier https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/schneiers_law.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/schneiers_law...
- jiggawatts 7y ago
  The author reminds of some religious people I've had debates with in the past. They would make some fundamentally flawed argument, get shot down, and so they would move on to other arguments, which is not great but valid. But then, later, I'd see them making the exact same argument to someone else. To people like this, arguing is like punching. If you punch someone and they get up, they're a "tough opponent". That doesn't mean that punching is ineffective on other people. They just don't understand at their core that once an argument is shown to be false, it can never be reused. Their mind just doesn't work this way. They think "Well, left-hook didn't work on this guy, but maybe it'll work in that guy" or "This guy didn't fall for this argument, but maybe that guy will." It's deeply dishonest, but I'm not convinced they're even aware of this. So, just from a cursory look at his code, the glaring problems I see are: 1) It'll crash if you feed it more than 256MB because of the way the C# BitArray class works. He's also using 32-bit ints in several places that have similar issues. These are implementation details, but it just goes to show how thoughtless the "reference implementation" is. 2) Similarly, the reference implementation copies the entire data into the BitArrary (and then back into a byte array) for each "round". This is spectacularly inefficient. He never mentions throughput in terms of MB/s/GHz or any such thing. I wonder why... 3) It's not a stream cipher. You need to encrypt the entire file. Again, he could come up with some sort of streaming version by feeding in the last few KB of the previous encrypted chunk into the next chunk, but he hasn't. As the long history of various streaming ciphers have shown, this is actually a hard problem to solve efficiently and securely. This is why AES-GCM is the hot new thing: it's both. 4) If either the key or salt values are all 0s then the encryption does nothing. AES for comparison will still encrypt your data with some level of security even if the IV initialisation is not perfectly random or skipped. 5) He's calculating the offsets as an "int" from a byte multiplied by a byte. Hence the maximum shift is 65536 positions. This is just big enough to exceed L1 data cache on most platforms, but have a high hit ratio. Whether you hit the L1 cache or not depends on the Key & IV values, so this is a recipe for timing-based side-channel attacks. Constant-time cyphers are basically mandatory these days... 6) Related to the above: The bit shifts are only in an 8KB window, but the byte shifts are in an 64KB window. I wonder if there's some interaction here where this might make some keys insecure. 7) Despite this windowing, the default "protocol" wraps around the end of the file to the beginning using a modulo the data.Length, so it can't be used as a streaming cipher. To do so, he'd have to introduce a breaking change. 8) The encryption is defined in terms of bit-by-bit and byte-by-byte long-range operations, so there's basically no hope of ever making this efficient. E.g.: with SIMD or similar many-bytes-at-a-time instruction sets. The "state" that would have to be kept in CPU registers is over 64KB, so this is just never, ever, EVER going to compete with something like AES-NI. I could go on, but I'm wasting my time. This is wasting everyone's time. The author clearly has no interest in producing something that is secure and usable. He's just enjoying the arguments. He's even posted some of the feedback on his GitHub, proudly showing off the debates he's felt he's won. Don't feed this troll.
- andrewflnr 7y ago
  > sometimes I wonder if a fragile ego isn't one of the greatest barriers to cyber security.. If you include the fragile egos of sysadmins and executives who refuse to fix their systems, then yes, absolutely.
- userbinator 7y ago
  On the other hand, I feel like the elitist, alienating "don't even try to learn, just obey us" attitude of much of the cryptography/security community could also be making the situation worse. I mean, a key-and-data-dependent permutation is how a lot of ciphers work; that's not a fundamentally flawed idea. The details of the implementation are a different matter, however.
  - chapium 7y ago
    Fortunately most books don't have an opinion about who is reading them.
  - infinity0 7y ago
    That's like saying "being a vehicle is how a lot of cars work"; the reasons on why the cipher is flawed are a bit more specific than that. As for the elitist arrogance, whilst I'm sure these exist in other security-related interactions across the world, the interaction that's the subject of this thread involves plenty of polite comments that - point out author's lack of background knowledge - refer to short-cut theorems that help evaluate a cipher, implying the author should learn about these theorems - explicitly tell the author to learn about these theorems In response to this, the very first reply the author gives is "It almost sounds like you have had your soul crushed by bureaucracy over the years and have lost all passion for this field. I hope that's not true." Yeah, however much "arrogant" you interpret the security people in this thread to be, it's only fair to interpret the OP (Mark McCarron) to be 2-3x as arrogant.
  - lima 7y ago
    They did in fact encourage him to learn and even pointed him to various entry-level resources and mailing lists.
  - bob1029 7y ago
    I am honestly very triggered by any tone of elitism in the sphere of intellectual or professional pursuits. It's not just in tech - just try googling 'DIY HVAC Repair'. Now, I don't advocate partaking in activities which are legitimately dangerous without training and certification (e.g. charging an HVAC system with freon or operating a crane), but when all you are trying to do is replace a contactor in your HVAC system and you get a wall of "DIY is not allowed here" when asking basic questions, it really puts some hate into your soul. Cryptographers give me the exact same sensation with their 'no DIY' rhetoric. At the end of the day for me, it mostly boils down to some ulterior agenda which seeks to keep competition or perceived threats to the incumbents' control at bay. Does the NSA have a vested interest in most technology workers being able to competently roll their own encryption schemes? From my very jaded political perspective, I would say absolutely not. It arguably makes their mission exponentially harder if they have to deal with novel approaches to securing communications. They would probably prefer everyone just use ECC with their hand-selected curve parameters.
- lilSebastian 7y ago
  > The authors inability to take any criticism is stunning Unfortunately I find that this is all too common.
xtacy 7y ago
It's a funny coincidence that I was just reading this book (https://toc.cryptobook.us/ https://toc.cryptobook.us/), Figure 4.5 on book page 102, that talks about this exact issue. I doubt the author realises that the system must be resistant against a class of attacks (in this case, I believe a chosen plaintext attack). From reading the thread, and comparing it to the example in the book, it seems like the non-uniform patterns in the output highlight a possibility of a CPA. And of course, the author wants a fully implemented + concrete attack instead of pointing to what's an obvious flaw to the crypto community.
- jascii 7y ago
  At some point in the thread the author complains that it isn't fair to point out the repetitive patterns "because the clear-text is all zeroes and this would be masked by actual data"
  - jschwartzi 7y ago
    My first thought was "what if I wanted to encrypt and transmit all-zeroes as a message?"
  - sidewndr46 7y ago
    So the author tried to encrypt the null byte, repeated thousands of times? That seems like the most pointless test I could dream up for any processing algorithm. Computes all the primes less than 0? Already. Achieve compression approaching 100% on a string of zeroes? Easy. Losslessly compress an image with all pixels having opacity of 0? Easy
    - RL_Quine 7y ago
      It’s a good demonstration of failure that might otherwise be masked
    - henrikschroder 7y ago
      If an all-null message results in a simple/repeating ciphertext, it means that there exists at least one message whose ciphertext leaks information, and that in turns means that there are probably more messages like it, and it's also probable that all messages leak info in varying degrees.
kazinator 7y ago
Dyed-in-the-wool kook/crank. http://web.mst.edu/%7Elmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf http://web.mst.edu/%7Elmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf
- bscphil 7y ago
  Someone points this out in the email chain, as well, linking to Schneier's famous list of 9 warning signs: https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/1999/0215.html#snakeoil https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/1999/0215.html... I'd add the following three generic warning signs of crackpots, all of which are on display here. 1. Person doesn't know mailing list etiquette, for example top-posting and failing to send hard-wrapped plain text messages. Also not understanding the purpose of a mailing list intended for something else. 2. Person claims that others are rejecting basic principles of open-mindedness and making trivial errors in reasoning, or that they don't understand foundational elements of their field. Accusations of rudeness and threats to professional reputation. 3. Person uses just enough technical jargon to give the impression that they have some fluency in the relevant field. When corrected, they often seem to just barely misunderstand the correction, in order to give correspondents the false hope that they are open to being shown their errors. Thanks for the Trisector link, it's been a couple years since I've read that one.
- distances 7y ago
  Thanks for the link, a very entertaining morning read!
- sideeffffect 7y ago
  that was a great article, quite funny too. thank you!
misterprime 7y ago
This might actually be good to included as required reading in first year computer science courses. It's an excellent example of "how not to conduct yourself".
- htk 7y ago
  Actually in any science. He was surrounded by knowledgeable people pointing the flaws in his work and he didn't learn anything from it. Maybe it’s one form of lunacy.
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
I wish HN was almost entirely nerdy out of the way awesome found things like this. https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/cfrg/cdeJ91NBT_-yU24Q3CnZe5N-SVA/ https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/cfrg/cdeJ91NBT_-yU24Q3... That part is one of the best dressing downs I've ever read on the internet.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  That kind of public dressing-down makes me feel uncomfortable. If I take pleasure in reading such a thing, I feel ugly afterward.
  - enriquto 7y ago
    It's not the first response he received. At the beginning they treated him respectfully, but the man was obnoxious to the extreme. I had great fun reading this.
walrus01 7y ago
It seems inevitable that every so often some person shows up with zero math/crypto credentials who claims they've invented a new miracle cryptosystem. It's always eviscerated by the professionals.
- undersuit 7y ago
  Like the guy with a garage and tools that invents a perpetual motion machine.
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago
  The problem isn't necessarily having no math/crypto credential, but falsely believe one has unique insights, while refusing to learn even the basis of a subject. It's more of an issue in psychology, than an issue of knowledge.
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  The same with compression, amazingly enough, where you just have to implement your algorithm.
hyper_reality 7y ago
The Register have an article about this guy from 12 years before this where he apparently besieged a mailing list with his plans for a revolutionary anti-spam system: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/07/11/weve_found_the_perfect_solution/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/07/11/weve_found_the_perf...
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  Holy crap what a rabbit hole indeed! "Thirdly, we deliberately introduced confusion over the systems architecture. This was not to protect any secrets we had, it was just another tactic in the controversial marketing tactic." So it's not that he can't explain how it works, he deliberately introduced errors in the explanation, which allows him to conveniently claim that people poking holes in his crap don't actually understand the system, because he hasn't accurately described the system! Haha! Gotcha! Therefore the system is perfect! "I had done it, I was the first in the world to prove, beyond any doubt, that the pyramids of the Giza Necropolis were, in fact, a scale representation of the three inner planets." Wow. Just wow. That took a turn. Extensive pattern matching is a marker for mental illness, and is no joke. That explains so much about the author.
- wolfgang42 7y ago
  To be fair to Mr. McCarron, having muddled my way through his accusations against ASRG and life history, the basic idea of his scheme¹ is simple and appears sound; when DKIM was later standardized it would achieve the same result (albeit by cryptography rather than a simple token check). Unfortunately, he seems to have missed the idea of just adding a new envelope header and SMTP command, and instead gone the route of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and reinventing not only the wheel, but quite possibly the concept of circularity itself. Not only was GEIS to have replaced SMTP (in an entirely incompatible way), but he even went so far as to declare that “all 'GIEIS' servers will run on a separate transmission protocol (not TCP/IP).” Add to that protocol megalomania some impenetrable architecture diagrams, a curious bit of Egyptology, self-admitted arrogance, and a very suspicious bit of sock-puppetry, and it's no wonder that the Register gave him such a send-up. ¹(include a nonce when sending an email, which the recipient can check with the originating server to confirm that the email is genuine)
AdamJacobMuller 7y ago
Is there a term for someone like this? It's like a reverse imposter syndrome. Really sad.
- ThJ 7y ago
  Dunning-Kruger effect
  - AdamJacobMuller 7y ago
    This guy got stuck at the first peak of Dunning-Kruger and won't move off it, on any subject it seems.
- clickok 7y ago
  I believe "crank" suffices, or possibly "poseur".
  - Terr_ 7y ago
    I think "poseur" is less-suitable, since it implies the person is motivated by the glamour of the role. Not many people--crank or otherwise--go into cryptography for the fame.
- samatman 7y ago
  Yes, this sort of person is known as a crank.
- Llamia49 7y ago
  Crank https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_(person) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_(person)
irjustin 7y ago
Reading this reminds me of situations for Anti-vax, religion vs science, red vs blue, flat earthers vs.... the rest of us? Whatever their "idea" is, is infallible. Minds cannot be changed with logic or debate when clearly wrong/false. A belief is unbreakable if the person holding it wishes it to be so. Discussing such topics over the internet will never lead to yielding any ground. Perhaps at the core of it is the fear of being rejected or wrong. Or that their world as they know it is crumbling and keeping it together is of the highest requirement + cost. I keep hope for these discussions in that people can change. As cheesy as it is to say, I've only seen people really change when it's with love. That we reach out the other side and simply love the person first. Daryl Davis is my hero on this[0]. Unrealistic in a forum about cryptographic schemes, but it hurts for me to read the circles the author plays himself into. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
- teddyh 7y ago
  People can only change when they themselves want to change. To make them want to change, you have to find a reason for them to want to have already changed. If you find a good enough reason, they will then slowly convince themselves that the change is good.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    That psychological tricks like this are necessary to make people see that 1+1=2 makes me feel hopeless that humanity can ever reach the level of Star Trek without some kind of genetic engineering or letting AI take over. The vast majority of people are like this, incapable of reasoning through anything, only defending the views they grew up with or that they ascribe to their "tribe" by any means possible, never taking a Planck unit of time to self-reflect. There's some respite on select internet corners but even those have their pockets of crazies. I recently had to regrettably leave a fandom Discord server because a sizable portion of the populace including the admin devolved into screeching banshees with no capacity for rational thought at some /slightly different/ view than they preferred being posted in their politics channel, and I could no longer justify expending any energy trying to engage in a reasonable fashion with these people or supporting a server with such a rotten administration I'd lost all respect for. I wonder if those of us who can consider ideas without throwing ourselves on the floor in a tantrum over the fact someone disagreed with us should just move to another planet then come back and conquer Earth in the five years it would take us to develop the capacity to do so without such people in our way.
iandinwoodie 7y ago
If anyone wants another rabbit hole, reading through the Open Street Map Foundation resolution for the indefinite ban of user sorein is a good evening read: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/493 https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/493
- wolfgang42 7y ago
  Wow, I imagine it takes a lot of work for your ban to get a 49-page PDF report written about it: > In response, Harry Wood of the Communications Working Group tries to reason with Mr. Acela (Appendix A.3), and Sorin continues his rude replies, claiming that the redaction process was STUPID and that the community members [...] are terrorists (Appendix A.4). > [...] > It never came to a Skype session because mediation requires a certain base level of respect and understanding between the parties.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- csours 7y ago
  I read that whole thing. I actually agreed with sorein's first couple of emails, but man, did it go downhill from there.
jagged-chisel 7y ago
I remember similar stuff from the data compression usenet groups years ago. So if anyone is interested, I have software that’ll compress megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes of data down to a kilobyte! And it can encrypt your data so that not even state actors can recover! Sure, you can’t recover the data, but it’s compressed and encrypted so that your adversaries also can’t.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  This sounds like my super fast nosql data store, /dev/null
  - hinkley 7y ago
    It’s webscale, too.
    - cortesoft 7y ago
      Only if you shard it.
      - hinkley 7y ago
        That sounds like an excellent PR to submit to the Linux kernel team on April 1. Round robin load balancing or fewest connections? Maybe a flag for both.
jijji 7y ago
it looks less like airbourne influenza and more like airbourne HIV, at least from the fact that people are testing positive weeks after treatment [0]... [0] https://www.todayonline.com/world/covid-19-far-more-likely-sars-bond-human-cells-due-hiv-mutation-scientists-say https://www.todayonline.com/world/covid-19-far-more-likely-s...
- cortesoft 7y ago
  Wrong thread?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
userbinator 7y ago
I thought it would be a link to the infamous ECB image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tux_ecb.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tux_ecb.jpg
cortesoft 7y ago
It gets so frustrating when people with obviously crazy ideas get upset if you don't engage with them and tell them why they are wrong. Some ideas are just so crazy they aren't worth wasting time engaging on them.
jancsika 7y ago
Has anyone written a wrapper algorithm to encode/decode "obvious repeating patterns" to be used by common software that uses cryptography? Call it something like "crackpot.js"
tialaramex 7y ago
Earlier today I was watching a YouTube video somebody referenced in my social media feed about Fake Martial Arts. Mostly these aren't just heavily stylised exercises that have limited practical value as fighting styles, they're woo like energy blasts or psychic power that can't work at all. Practitioners wave their hands or say magic words and seemingly defeat groups of skilled foes. Except it's bullshit. The video includes some unpleasant though relatively brief excerpts showing what happens when a practitioner of such a fake won't back down and fights someone who knows what they're doing. They generally seem initially very confident and then within seconds they're on the ground just trying to keep from getting further hurt. That they'd show up and fight rather than make thin excuses and vanish suggests these people are delusional rather than (or as well as) crooks. Fighting and cryptography are both disciplines where it isn't just a matter of opinion whether you're right.
- RyJones 7y ago
  I watched that video, and it is stunning. The older guy getting beaten was hard to watch. That he learned nothing from it was even harder
- camjohnson26 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA
seemslegit 7y ago
Between the github account and theregister article posted in the comments here it is clear that the person in question is psychologically unwell regardless of whether he believes his own assertions or acts them out in some performative capacity. Using it to draw morals about thickness or inability to address criticism is not very helpful here.
schoen 7y ago
(2015)
bitexploder 7y ago
To be fair you can use AES to produce repeating patterns as well. Just look up Tux encrypted with any modern block cipher using ECB: https://blog.filippo.io/the-ecb-penguin/ https://blog.filippo.io/the-ecb-penguin/
- namibj 7y ago
  A fair comparison would be e.g. CTR or incrementing the key for each block. This is a problem much lower.
  - bitexploder 7y ago
    That’s true. The analysis isn’t wrong, but it isn’t an algorithmic analysis. It’s just a quick statistical analysis that detects inherently bad properties for crypto. That was more my point. This kind of analysis isn’t bad but it’s just a sniff test.
- jokoon 7y ago
  how do you avoid that?
  - bitexploder 7y ago
    Look up “cryptographic right answers” and dig up the threads from HN on it. Basically, don’t do the crypto yourself (even using with algorithms/constructs)
  - dependenttypes 7y ago
    By not using ECB.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
BubRoss 7y ago
Interestingly these same sorts of visual patterns can be found when generating samples using poor pseudo random numbers like C rand() function. When using C++ mersenne twister algorithm the obvious coherency patterns go away.
- userbinator 7y ago
  That's what the pattern reminded me of too. More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_test
natch 7y ago
If you read through the thread, it becomes clear that mental illness is a factor here. With so many such cases over the years, it's as though cryptography has its own flavor of Jerusalem Syndrome. It's such a magnet for this. The overconfidence of some of these people is really impressive. Plot twist: while being wrong about almost everything technically, perhaps he's right about the NSA wanting the conversation confined to a small, well understood set of algorithms. But still, ugh, no thank you to what he's offering.
thiswasnorabbit 7y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20060429213545/http://www.gieis.uni.cc/ http://web.archive.org/web/20060429213545/http://www.gieis.u... And then just fast forward a bit in time.
praptak 7y ago
"I'm somewhat disappointed in your reply, as I presumed that someone with a stated interest in ciphers would be eager to investigate anything new to pop up that didn't have obvious holes in it." This is totally, utterly and critically wrong. Ciphers with "no obvious holes" are dime a dozen. Nobody is interested in looking at your cipher unless you both have strong evidence that it's beats the existing ones in at least one area and that you did your homework to check for known weaknesses.
jokoon 7y ago
I wonder if the NSA can actively lead developers towards bad crypto practices.
st_goliath 7y ago
I've read through some of the mails and the description of the algorithm on Github. This gives me some serious Kryptochef vibes. If you haven't come across that name before: way back when, some guy was trying to sell his "Vollbitverschlüsselung" (Full-bit-encryption) software which he touted as the most secure in the world with an utterly bizarre explanation on how it was supposed to work. I'm not absolutely sure to this day if it was an elaborate hoax or whether he was actually serious. The Kryptochef Website (German): https://web.archive.org/web/20111011174408/http://kryptochef.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20111011174408/http://kryptochef... English translation with broken page layout: https://web.archive.org/web/20111024003746/http://kryptochef.net/indexh2e.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20111024003746/http://kryptochef...

210 points by EthanHeilman 7y ago

Thanks for that rabbit hole! See also: https://github.com/mmcc1/crystalline https://github.com/mmcc1/crystalline http://maldr0id.blogspot.com/2015/05/crystalline-cipher-and-cryptography.html http://maldr0id.blogspot.com/2015/05/crystalline-cipher-and-... The authors inability to take any criticism is stunning, sometimes I wonder if a fragile ego isn't one of the greatest barriers to cyber security..

asudosandwich 7y ago
What if he’s not meant to be read in good faith?
thethirdone 7y ago
From the github README: > Designed to be as secure as a one-time pad, without a weakness due to the use of repeating keys, That immediately shows that the person writing it doesn't know cryptography. You simply can't get the security of one-time pad without having a key the size of the data, and if you do, just use it as the pad.
- cryptonector 7y ago
  And you can't reuse the keys in a one-time pad system.
  - jascii 7y ago
    Lol, I always wondered what the "one-time" bit meant ;)
  - klingonopera 7y ago
    Nitpick: You can, but you shouldn't.
    - jascii 7y ago
      Nitpick: the moment you do, it stops being a one-time pad.
      - klingonopera 7y ago
        I've always wondered if the assumption, they're never using the same one twice, would suffice to practically always use the same one then (assuming data-length never changes).
        alecbenzer 7y ago
        Not sure what you're asking? If you use the same key over and over again, then you're using the same key much more than just twice. The idea of a one-time-pad is that you're basically just randomly flipping the bits of your input, which means the output of an OTP cipher is indistinguishable from random data. If you're using the same key multiple times though, then the output of the cipher (considered over time) won't be random, and you'll be able to detect patterns from the original input in the cipher output (e.g., the shape of an image, frequency of certain letters).
        klingonopera 7y ago
        The output is always random, regardless how often the key has been used. The thing is, if you know the same key has been used a second time, then yes, having both outputs (can? will? must? could?) helps to acquire the key. But how do you know they're using the same one? Or how are you sure, they're not? All you have, are two pieces of random data.
        alecbenzer 7y ago
        > The output is always random, regardless how often the key has been used. The output of any _one_ use of the pad is, yes, but the point is to consider all of the data that an attacker may have. If you re-use the key multiple times, then the entirety of the cipher texts an attacker has is not random. (See also: https://xkcd.com/221/ https://xkcd.com/221/) > But how do you know they're using the same one? Or how are you sure, they're not? You'll be able to tell because you'll see patterns in the data: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Tux_ecb.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Tux_ecb....
- Someone 7y ago
  There’s also the claim > Crystalline employs information loss as the basis of its security. If encryption loses information, there’s no way decryption can bring it back. In the extreme def encrypt(s): return “(TOP SECRET)” is totally secure, but also totally useless.
  - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
    Not useless. This is, in fact, the most widely used encryption algorithm in declassified government documents! /joke
  - khazhoux 7y ago
    Not totally useless. You just need the dual: def decrypt("(TOP SECRET)"): return s
    - alexeiz 7y ago
      I know how to fix it. Blockchain!
  - dreamcompiler 7y ago
    I noticed this too. One of two things is going on: a. The author cannot decrypt it either, unless he's cheating somehow, or b. It's not really losing information and the author is lying.
- infinity0 7y ago
  >> Designed to be as secure as a one-time pad, > That immediately shows that the person writing it doesn't know cryptography. You simply can't get the security of one-time pad [..] Talking about a one-time pad at all in the context of making something actually secure for internet usage, shows that the talker doesn't know about cryptography. A one-time pad having "perfect security" is only true in the context of a particular security model that doesn't generally hold true on the internet - one where the adversary cannot change the ciphertext whilst it is in transit. Under a more realistic security model, we need a message authentication code or some other equivalent, to protect against adversaries changing the ciphertext. It's a well-known theorem of modern cryptography that in fact if you don't have secure authentication under this model, then you cannot achieve secure privacy. In other words, your ciphertext has to be bigger than the plaintext for security on the internet. (There is in fact a one-time-pad equivalent for MACs where your key is the length of the plaintext and the ciphertext ends up being several multiple times the length of the plaintext, but crackpots when making security arguments about "one-time pads" generally aren't referring to this and aren't even aware of the existence of this. It's a relatively unknown construction and nobody really talks about it in the context of serious modern cryptography.)
  - scolby33 7y ago
    What is the MAC-like construction for an OTP cipher?
    - fdupress 7y ago
      One-time MACs... The most widely used constructions are based on polynomials: GHASH (from GCM) and Poly1305.
cryptonector 7y ago
This happens with some regularity in the crypto scene. Someone comes up with a cipher and they think it must be awesome! because they came up with it. Not being cryptographers, these ciphers always fall quickly, then the authors get defensive. I want a doll with Alan Turing's likeness that says "cryptography is hard" when you pull the cord.
- jascii 7y ago
  Cryptography is hard enough when using proven algorithms..
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    I remember on an old crypto mailing list some lowly PHP programmer asking if instead of a grab bag of primitives there was some library where he could just encrypt/decrypt a random object. Without having to build a Frankenstein thing out of random cryptographic parts. Everyone peed on him and he never came back. The poor sap was right though. The proven algorithms tend to fail catastrophically when used or implemented incorrectly.
    - larzang 7y ago
      Ironically now PHP is one of the few high-level languages doing this right, with built-in libsodium support and an excellent idiot-proof library available in Halite on top of that.
      - jjeaff 7y ago
        Agreed. And it even has a global you can use for the cipher that is updated along with the php version.
- teddyh 7y ago
  “Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break.” — Bruce Schneier https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/schneiers_law.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/schneiers_law...
jiggawatts 7y ago
The author reminds of some religious people I've had debates with in the past. They would make some fundamentally flawed argument, get shot down, and so they would move on to other arguments, which is not great but valid. But then, later, I'd see them making the exact same argument to someone else. To people like this, arguing is like punching. If you punch someone and they get up, they're a "tough opponent". That doesn't mean that punching is ineffective on other people. They just don't understand at their core that once an argument is shown to be false, it can never be reused. Their mind just doesn't work this way. They think "Well, left-hook didn't work on this guy, but maybe it'll work in that guy" or "This guy didn't fall for this argument, but maybe that guy will." It's deeply dishonest, but I'm not convinced they're even aware of this. So, just from a cursory look at his code, the glaring problems I see are: 1) It'll crash if you feed it more than 256MB because of the way the C# BitArray class works. He's also using 32-bit ints in several places that have similar issues. These are implementation details, but it just goes to show how thoughtless the "reference implementation" is. 2) Similarly, the reference implementation copies the entire data into the BitArrary (and then back into a byte array) for each "round". This is spectacularly inefficient. He never mentions throughput in terms of MB/s/GHz or any such thing. I wonder why... 3) It's not a stream cipher. You need to encrypt the entire file. Again, he could come up with some sort of streaming version by feeding in the last few KB of the previous encrypted chunk into the next chunk, but he hasn't. As the long history of various streaming ciphers have shown, this is actually a hard problem to solve efficiently and securely. This is why AES-GCM is the hot new thing: it's both. 4) If either the key or salt values are all 0s then the encryption does nothing. AES for comparison will still encrypt your data with some level of security even if the IV initialisation is not perfectly random or skipped. 5) He's calculating the offsets as an "int" from a byte multiplied by a byte. Hence the maximum shift is 65536 positions. This is just big enough to exceed L1 data cache on most platforms, but have a high hit ratio. Whether you hit the L1 cache or not depends on the Key & IV values, so this is a recipe for timing-based side-channel attacks. Constant-time cyphers are basically mandatory these days... 6) Related to the above: The bit shifts are only in an 8KB window, but the byte shifts are in an 64KB window. I wonder if there's some interaction here where this might make some keys insecure. 7) Despite this windowing, the default "protocol" wraps around the end of the file to the beginning using a modulo the data.Length, so it can't be used as a streaming cipher. To do so, he'd have to introduce a breaking change. 8) The encryption is defined in terms of bit-by-bit and byte-by-byte long-range operations, so there's basically no hope of ever making this efficient. E.g.: with SIMD or similar many-bytes-at-a-time instruction sets. The "state" that would have to be kept in CPU registers is over 64KB, so this is just never, ever, EVER going to compete with something like AES-NI. I could go on, but I'm wasting my time. This is wasting everyone's time. The author clearly has no interest in producing something that is secure and usable. He's just enjoying the arguments. He's even posted some of the feedback on his GitHub, proudly showing off the debates he's felt he's won. Don't feed this troll.
andrewflnr 7y ago
> sometimes I wonder if a fragile ego isn't one of the greatest barriers to cyber security.. If you include the fragile egos of sysadmins and executives who refuse to fix their systems, then yes, absolutely.
userbinator 7y ago
On the other hand, I feel like the elitist, alienating "don't even try to learn, just obey us" attitude of much of the cryptography/security community could also be making the situation worse. I mean, a key-and-data-dependent permutation is how a lot of ciphers work; that's not a fundamentally flawed idea. The details of the implementation are a different matter, however.
- chapium 7y ago
  Fortunately most books don't have an opinion about who is reading them.
- infinity0 7y ago
  That's like saying "being a vehicle is how a lot of cars work"; the reasons on why the cipher is flawed are a bit more specific than that. As for the elitist arrogance, whilst I'm sure these exist in other security-related interactions across the world, the interaction that's the subject of this thread involves plenty of polite comments that - point out author's lack of background knowledge - refer to short-cut theorems that help evaluate a cipher, implying the author should learn about these theorems - explicitly tell the author to learn about these theorems In response to this, the very first reply the author gives is "It almost sounds like you have had your soul crushed by bureaucracy over the years and have lost all passion for this field. I hope that's not true." Yeah, however much "arrogant" you interpret the security people in this thread to be, it's only fair to interpret the OP (Mark McCarron) to be 2-3x as arrogant.
- lima 7y ago
  They did in fact encourage him to learn and even pointed him to various entry-level resources and mailing lists.
- bob1029 7y ago
  I am honestly very triggered by any tone of elitism in the sphere of intellectual or professional pursuits. It's not just in tech - just try googling 'DIY HVAC Repair'. Now, I don't advocate partaking in activities which are legitimately dangerous without training and certification (e.g. charging an HVAC system with freon or operating a crane), but when all you are trying to do is replace a contactor in your HVAC system and you get a wall of "DIY is not allowed here" when asking basic questions, it really puts some hate into your soul. Cryptographers give me the exact same sensation with their 'no DIY' rhetoric. At the end of the day for me, it mostly boils down to some ulterior agenda which seeks to keep competition or perceived threats to the incumbents' control at bay. Does the NSA have a vested interest in most technology workers being able to competently roll their own encryption schemes? From my very jaded political perspective, I would say absolutely not. It arguably makes their mission exponentially harder if they have to deal with novel approaches to securing communications. They would probably prefer everyone just use ECC with their hand-selected curve parameters.
lilSebastian 7y ago
> The authors inability to take any criticism is stunning Unfortunately I find that this is all too common.

xtacy 7y ago

It's a funny coincidence that I was just reading this book (https://toc.cryptobook.us/ https://toc.cryptobook.us/), Figure 4.5 on book page 102, that talks about this exact issue. I doubt the author realises that the system must be resistant against a class of attacks (in this case, I believe a chosen plaintext attack). From reading the thread, and comparing it to the example in the book, it seems like the non-uniform patterns in the output highlight a possibility of a CPA. And of course, the author wants a fully implemented + concrete attack instead of pointing to what's an obvious flaw to the crypto community.

jascii 7y ago
At some point in the thread the author complains that it isn't fair to point out the repetitive patterns "because the clear-text is all zeroes and this would be masked by actual data"
- jschwartzi 7y ago
  My first thought was "what if I wanted to encrypt and transmit all-zeroes as a message?"
- sidewndr46 7y ago
  So the author tried to encrypt the null byte, repeated thousands of times? That seems like the most pointless test I could dream up for any processing algorithm. Computes all the primes less than 0? Already. Achieve compression approaching 100% on a string of zeroes? Easy. Losslessly compress an image with all pixels having opacity of 0? Easy
  - RL_Quine 7y ago
    It’s a good demonstration of failure that might otherwise be masked
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    If an all-null message results in a simple/repeating ciphertext, it means that there exists at least one message whose ciphertext leaks information, and that in turns means that there are probably more messages like it, and it's also probable that all messages leak info in varying degrees.

kazinator 7y ago

Dyed-in-the-wool kook/crank. http://web.mst.edu/%7Elmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf http://web.mst.edu/%7Elmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf

bscphil 7y ago
Someone points this out in the email chain, as well, linking to Schneier's famous list of 9 warning signs: https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/1999/0215.html#snakeoil https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/1999/0215.html... I'd add the following three generic warning signs of crackpots, all of which are on display here. 1. Person doesn't know mailing list etiquette, for example top-posting and failing to send hard-wrapped plain text messages. Also not understanding the purpose of a mailing list intended for something else. 2. Person claims that others are rejecting basic principles of open-mindedness and making trivial errors in reasoning, or that they don't understand foundational elements of their field. Accusations of rudeness and threats to professional reputation. 3. Person uses just enough technical jargon to give the impression that they have some fluency in the relevant field. When corrected, they often seem to just barely misunderstand the correction, in order to give correspondents the false hope that they are open to being shown their errors. Thanks for the Trisector link, it's been a couple years since I've read that one.
distances 7y ago
Thanks for the link, a very entertaining morning read!
sideeffffect 7y ago
that was a great article, quite funny too. thank you!

misterprime 7y ago

This might actually be good to included as required reading in first year computer science courses. It's an excellent example of "how not to conduct yourself".

htk 7y ago
Actually in any science. He was surrounded by knowledgeable people pointing the flaws in his work and he didn't learn anything from it. Maybe it’s one form of lunacy.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

I wish HN was almost entirely nerdy out of the way awesome found things like this. https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/cfrg/cdeJ91NBT_-yU24Q3CnZe5N-SVA/ https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/cfrg/cdeJ91NBT_-yU24Q3... That part is one of the best dressing downs I've ever read on the internet.

DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
That kind of public dressing-down makes me feel uncomfortable. If I take pleasure in reading such a thing, I feel ugly afterward.
- enriquto 7y ago
  It's not the first response he received. At the beginning they treated him respectfully, but the man was obnoxious to the extreme. I had great fun reading this.

walrus01 7y ago

It seems inevitable that every so often some person shows up with zero math/crypto credentials who claims they've invented a new miracle cryptosystem. It's always eviscerated by the professionals.

undersuit 7y ago
Like the guy with a garage and tools that invents a perpetual motion machine.
segfaultbuserr 7y ago
The problem isn't necessarily having no math/crypto credential, but falsely believe one has unique insights, while refusing to learn even the basis of a subject. It's more of an issue in psychology, than an issue of knowledge.
SamReidHughes 7y ago
The same with compression, amazingly enough, where you just have to implement your algorithm.

hyper_reality 7y ago

The Register have an article about this guy from 12 years before this where he apparently besieged a mailing list with his plans for a revolutionary anti-spam system: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/07/11/weve_found_the_perfect_solution/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/07/11/weve_found_the_perf...

henrikschroder 7y ago
Holy crap what a rabbit hole indeed! "Thirdly, we deliberately introduced confusion over the systems architecture. This was not to protect any secrets we had, it was just another tactic in the controversial marketing tactic." So it's not that he can't explain how it works, he deliberately introduced errors in the explanation, which allows him to conveniently claim that people poking holes in his crap don't actually understand the system, because he hasn't accurately described the system! Haha! Gotcha! Therefore the system is perfect! "I had done it, I was the first in the world to prove, beyond any doubt, that the pyramids of the Giza Necropolis were, in fact, a scale representation of the three inner planets." Wow. Just wow. That took a turn. Extensive pattern matching is a marker for mental illness, and is no joke. That explains so much about the author.
wolfgang42 7y ago
To be fair to Mr. McCarron, having muddled my way through his accusations against ASRG and life history, the basic idea of his scheme¹ is simple and appears sound; when DKIM was later standardized it would achieve the same result (albeit by cryptography rather than a simple token check). Unfortunately, he seems to have missed the idea of just adding a new envelope header and SMTP command, and instead gone the route of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and reinventing not only the wheel, but quite possibly the concept of circularity itself. Not only was GEIS to have replaced SMTP (in an entirely incompatible way), but he even went so far as to declare that “all 'GIEIS' servers will run on a separate transmission protocol (not TCP/IP).” Add to that protocol megalomania some impenetrable architecture diagrams, a curious bit of Egyptology, self-admitted arrogance, and a very suspicious bit of sock-puppetry, and it's no wonder that the Register gave him such a send-up. ¹(include a nonce when sending an email, which the recipient can check with the originating server to confirm that the email is genuine)

AdamJacobMuller 7y ago

Is there a term for someone like this? It's like a reverse imposter syndrome. Really sad.

ThJ 7y ago
Dunning-Kruger effect
- AdamJacobMuller 7y ago
  This guy got stuck at the first peak of Dunning-Kruger and won't move off it, on any subject it seems.
clickok 7y ago
I believe "crank" suffices, or possibly "poseur".
- Terr_ 7y ago
  I think "poseur" is less-suitable, since it implies the person is motivated by the glamour of the role. Not many people--crank or otherwise--go into cryptography for the fame.
samatman 7y ago
Yes, this sort of person is known as a crank.
Llamia49 7y ago
Crank https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_(person) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_(person)

irjustin 7y ago

Reading this reminds me of situations for Anti-vax, religion vs science, red vs blue, flat earthers vs.... the rest of us? Whatever their "idea" is, is infallible. Minds cannot be changed with logic or debate when clearly wrong/false. A belief is unbreakable if the person holding it wishes it to be so. Discussing such topics over the internet will never lead to yielding any ground. Perhaps at the core of it is the fear of being rejected or wrong. Or that their world as they know it is crumbling and keeping it together is of the highest requirement + cost. I keep hope for these discussions in that people can change. As cheesy as it is to say, I've only seen people really change when it's with love. That we reach out the other side and simply love the person first. Daryl Davis is my hero on this[0]. Unrealistic in a forum about cryptographic schemes, but it hurts for me to read the circles the author plays himself into. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis

teddyh 7y ago
People can only change when they themselves want to change. To make them want to change, you have to find a reason for them to want to have already changed. If you find a good enough reason, they will then slowly convince themselves that the change is good.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  That psychological tricks like this are necessary to make people see that 1+1=2 makes me feel hopeless that humanity can ever reach the level of Star Trek without some kind of genetic engineering or letting AI take over. The vast majority of people are like this, incapable of reasoning through anything, only defending the views they grew up with or that they ascribe to their "tribe" by any means possible, never taking a Planck unit of time to self-reflect. There's some respite on select internet corners but even those have their pockets of crazies. I recently had to regrettably leave a fandom Discord server because a sizable portion of the populace including the admin devolved into screeching banshees with no capacity for rational thought at some /slightly different/ view than they preferred being posted in their politics channel, and I could no longer justify expending any energy trying to engage in a reasonable fashion with these people or supporting a server with such a rotten administration I'd lost all respect for. I wonder if those of us who can consider ideas without throwing ourselves on the floor in a tantrum over the fact someone disagreed with us should just move to another planet then come back and conquer Earth in the five years it would take us to develop the capacity to do so without such people in our way.

iandinwoodie 7y ago

If anyone wants another rabbit hole, reading through the Open Street Map Foundation resolution for the indefinite ban of user sorein is a good evening read: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/493 https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/493

wolfgang42 7y ago
Wow, I imagine it takes a lot of work for your ban to get a 49-page PDF report written about it: > In response, Harry Wood of the Communications Working Group tries to reason with Mr. Acela (Appendix A.3), and Sorin continues his rude replies, claiming that the redaction process was STUPID and that the community members [...] are terrorists (Appendix A.4). > [...] > It never came to a Skype session because mediation requires a certain base level of respect and understanding between the parties.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
csours 7y ago
I read that whole thing. I actually agreed with sorein's first couple of emails, but man, did it go downhill from there.

jagged-chisel 7y ago

I remember similar stuff from the data compression usenet groups years ago. So if anyone is interested, I have software that’ll compress megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes of data down to a kilobyte! And it can encrypt your data so that not even state actors can recover! Sure, you can’t recover the data, but it’s compressed and encrypted so that your adversaries also can’t.

cortesoft 7y ago
This sounds like my super fast nosql data store, /dev/null
- hinkley 7y ago
  It’s webscale, too.
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    Only if you shard it.
    - hinkley 7y ago
      That sounds like an excellent PR to submit to the Linux kernel team on April 1. Round robin load balancing or fewest connections? Maybe a flag for both.

jijji 7y ago

it looks less like airbourne influenza and more like airbourne HIV, at least from the fact that people are testing positive weeks after treatment [0]... [0] https://www.todayonline.com/world/covid-19-far-more-likely-sars-bond-human-cells-due-hiv-mutation-scientists-say https://www.todayonline.com/world/covid-19-far-more-likely-s...

cortesoft 7y ago
Wrong thread?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

userbinator 7y ago

I thought it would be a link to the infamous ECB image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tux_ecb.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tux_ecb.jpg

cortesoft 7y ago

It gets so frustrating when people with obviously crazy ideas get upset if you don't engage with them and tell them why they are wrong. Some ideas are just so crazy they aren't worth wasting time engaging on them.

jancsika 7y ago

Has anyone written a wrapper algorithm to encode/decode "obvious repeating patterns" to be used by common software that uses cryptography? Call it something like "crackpot.js"

tialaramex 7y ago

Earlier today I was watching a YouTube video somebody referenced in my social media feed about Fake Martial Arts. Mostly these aren't just heavily stylised exercises that have limited practical value as fighting styles, they're woo like energy blasts or psychic power that can't work at all. Practitioners wave their hands or say magic words and seemingly defeat groups of skilled foes. Except it's bullshit. The video includes some unpleasant though relatively brief excerpts showing what happens when a practitioner of such a fake won't back down and fights someone who knows what they're doing. They generally seem initially very confident and then within seconds they're on the ground just trying to keep from getting further hurt. That they'd show up and fight rather than make thin excuses and vanish suggests these people are delusional rather than (or as well as) crooks. Fighting and cryptography are both disciplines where it isn't just a matter of opinion whether you're right.

RyJones 7y ago
I watched that video, and it is stunning. The older guy getting beaten was hard to watch. That he learned nothing from it was even harder
camjohnson26 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA

seemslegit 7y ago

Between the github account and theregister article posted in the comments here it is clear that the person in question is psychologically unwell regardless of whether he believes his own assertions or acts them out in some performative capacity. Using it to draw morals about thickness or inability to address criticism is not very helpful here.

schoen 7y ago

(2015)

bitexploder 7y ago

To be fair you can use AES to produce repeating patterns as well. Just look up Tux encrypted with any modern block cipher using ECB: https://blog.filippo.io/the-ecb-penguin/ https://blog.filippo.io/the-ecb-penguin/

namibj 7y ago
A fair comparison would be e.g. CTR or incrementing the key for each block. This is a problem much lower.
- bitexploder 7y ago
  That’s true. The analysis isn’t wrong, but it isn’t an algorithmic analysis. It’s just a quick statistical analysis that detects inherently bad properties for crypto. That was more my point. This kind of analysis isn’t bad but it’s just a sniff test.
jokoon 7y ago
how do you avoid that?
- bitexploder 7y ago
  Look up “cryptographic right answers” and dig up the threads from HN on it. Basically, don’t do the crypto yourself (even using with algorithms/constructs)
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  By not using ECB.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

BubRoss 7y ago

Interestingly these same sorts of visual patterns can be found when generating samples using poor pseudo random numbers like C rand() function. When using C++ mersenne twister algorithm the obvious coherency patterns go away.

userbinator 7y ago
That's what the pattern reminded me of too. More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_test

natch 7y ago

If you read through the thread, it becomes clear that mental illness is a factor here. With so many such cases over the years, it's as though cryptography has its own flavor of Jerusalem Syndrome. It's such a magnet for this. The overconfidence of some of these people is really impressive. Plot twist: while being wrong about almost everything technically, perhaps he's right about the NSA wanting the conversation confined to a small, well understood set of algorithms. But still, ugh, no thank you to what he's offering.

thiswasnorabbit 7y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20060429213545/http://www.gieis.uni.cc/ http://web.archive.org/web/20060429213545/http://www.gieis.u... And then just fast forward a bit in time.

praptak 7y ago

"I'm somewhat disappointed in your reply, as I presumed that someone with a stated interest in ciphers would be eager to investigate anything new to pop up that didn't have obvious holes in it." This is totally, utterly and critically wrong. Ciphers with "no obvious holes" are dime a dozen. Nobody is interested in looking at your cipher unless you both have strong evidence that it's beats the existing ones in at least one area and that you did your homework to check for known weaknesses.

jokoon 7y ago

I wonder if the NSA can actively lead developers towards bad crypto practices.

st_goliath 7y ago

I've read through some of the mails and the description of the algorithm on Github. This gives me some serious Kryptochef vibes. If you haven't come across that name before: way back when, some guy was trying to sell his "Vollbitverschlüsselung" (Full-bit-encryption) software which he touted as the most secure in the world with an utterly bizarre explanation on how it was supposed to work. I'm not absolutely sure to this day if it was an elaborate hoax or whether he was actually serious. The Kryptochef Website (German): https://web.archive.org/web/20111011174408/http://kryptochef.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20111011174408/http://kryptochef... English translation with broken page layout: https://web.archive.org/web/20111024003746/http://kryptochef.net/indexh2e.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20111024003746/http://kryptochef...