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Zodiac Killer: Code-breakers solve San Francisco killer's cipher
- chadbennett 6y agoTLDR: HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH IS LIFE
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- elwell 6y agoNot TL. The most interesting part is how the video explain the decryption method.
- rightbyte 6y agoHe killed people to get as servants in the afterlife?
- superkuh 6y agoWouldn't that mean if he was put to death that he'd be the executioner's slave in the afterlife?
- selimthegrim 6y agoI guess that’s why he was afraid of the gas chamber.
- rightbyte 6y agoValid point. I guess he didn't think that far. "I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER" Or maybe he did a "curse" or something on the victims who knows.
- Mirioron 6y agoPerhaps he committed suicide and that was effectively his note?
- ehsankia 6y agoThis is something he mentions in other letters too, yes. The person was clearly mentally unwell.
- stanrivers 6y agoVery cool how they went through their steps etc in the video on Youtube. Lots of intelligence and hard work on show there. So part of me is excited / impressed / happy for them. Serious effort and seriously impressive. Especially catching Zodiac's mistake and adjusting for it to completely solve the cipher. They other part of me hates that someone so terrible has been able to capture the imaginations of people for so long with his terrible games.
- jfk13 6y agoSee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25390941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25390941 for earlier discussion.
- dpedu 6y agoIt seems like this is a rather simple cipher. Is it? I find it very surprising it took this long.
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoOf course it seems easy after they tell you how its done.
- cmdshiftf4 6y agoPeak Hacker News right here ^.
- tbrake 6y agoJust this, always. https://www.theonion.com/any-idiot-could-have-come-up-with-the-car-1819584314 https://www.theonion.com/any-idiot-could-have-come-up-with-t...
- jack_riminton 6y agoAlmost as good as the ole classic dropbox comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- HexagonalKitten 6y agoI wish whatever you were doing had peaked. We need less of it. In fact, this is a good question. As described in this thread (a transposition cipher layered over a substitution cypher) this is something easily crackable. And in fact, in the video we see an example of that easy automated cracking, once they'd figured out a roadblock issue. They touch on the actual difficulty in the video, but it obviously bears repeating - errors. Zodiac apparently screwed up in a few places, dropping a characters, misspelling words (maybe intentional), and so on. These days we tend to think of cyphers as mechanically perfects, and it's easy to not realize that this was created by an amateur with pen and paper.
- UncleEntity 6y agoThere was this artist's puzzle (which unlocked a bitcoin address) I was working on pretty hard for about a month or so and after it was solved it also seemed 'rather simple'. Turned out there was only one missing piece of information between my attempts and the actual solution which, in hindsight, was pretty obvious.
- nodesocket 6y agoI am probably being naive; but because the Zodiac uses multiple ciphers and eventually a very complex and detailed one, couldn’t we infer he was probably either a computer science or math major? Clearly this should have been able to filter out potentials suspects and reduce the pool of possible suspects? Just a run of the mill person is not gonna come up with these codes right?
- rightbyte 6y agoYou could probably make up those rules your self.
- realgabriel 6y agoOuch.
- _notreallyme_ 6y agoThe guy who came up with the tool used to help decipher is not a major in any of these fields. Moreover, this kind of puzzle is generally done by hobbyists, while some of them are scientists, it is not the scientific approach that guides them. The investigators have most probably followed the puzzle hobbyist trail considering the time and resources that have been used for the investigation...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jacobwilliamroy 6y agoWow, all that work and it was just some dumb nonsense (or maybe another cipher disguised as nonsense).
- blindm 6y ago> IN PARADICE DEATH Remember: reading the deciphered ramblings of a deranged psychopath is obviously going to have misspellings and weird idiosyncratic oddities in them. My take is (if the killer was in any way rational) is that she knew the plaintext would be unraveled at some stage. If not by quantum computers, then a team of dedicated sleuths who know how to program. So yes: the misspellings could be deliberate.
- IshKebab 6y agoShe?
- m000 6y agoThat's a generic she [1]. In recent years the generic she is becoming more rare, with people usually preferring the singular they [2]. Still, somehow the generic she seems to remain popular when discussing crypto-related topics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_gendered_third-person_pronouns#Generic_she https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
- a1369209993 6y ago> somehow the generic she seems to remain popular when discussing crypto-related topics. It's (in most cases) not generic, it's a specific pronoun for Alice and/or Eve. (Bob is, of course, "he".)
- m000 6y agoThat's probably the source of the continuing use of generic she in crypto. But e.g. in crypto papers, the use often extends beyond the examples involving Alice, Eve and Mallory.
- IshKebab 6y agoBut the Zodiac killer is known to be a man...
- heavymark 6y agoWhy is the message in the video much longer, including a part such as that wasn't me on the tv show, etc, but not in the text of the article?
- ehsankia 6y agoHow so, the message (pasted in this very comment thread), is exactly 339 character without spaces.
- todd8 6y agoBreaking ciphers was one of my hobbies growing up the 60's. I wasn't particularly good at it, but I understood the methods used--I read everything I could find on the subject that was available in the open literature. See the bibliography below if you'd like to try some interesting cryptography on paper and pencil methods. In graduate school I studied CS and I proposed to my Ph.D. advisor that I would like to do research into cryptography (this was 1983) and he told me that all the interesting things about cryptography have already been discovered and that I should work on something else. In 1983 Byte magazine, volume 3, an article proposed using a program based on the Bazeries Cylinder, see [6, 7], to obtain a practically unbreakable cipher. I didn't own a personal computer at the time, so as soon as I could get together with my best friend, a fellow grad student that owned a PC, we were able to break the cipher in just one evening. (Unfortunately, we were the second to do so and missing out on the $10 prize for the first person that broke the cipher.) There are paper and pencil ciphers that are well designed and are much stronger than the Zodiac Killer's ciphers as I understand them. One designed for Soviet spies, known as the VIC cipher, resisted US cryptographers (as far as I know) and is explained in an interesting Scientific American in the July 1966 edition, see [7]. See also [8]. * Pre-computer age cryptography [1] Helen Fouché Gaines, Cryptanalysis, https://archive.org/details/cryptanalysis00hele https://archive.org/details/cryptanalysis00hele [2] William F. Friedman, Riverbank Publications, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverbank_Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverbank_Publications [3] William F. Friedman, The Friedman Lectures on Cryptography, https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/friedman-documents/publications/ACC15281/41785109082412.pdf https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/decla... * Interesting historical information, there are so many to choose from now but two of my favorites (one old and one more recent) [4] David Kahn, The Code Breakers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Codebreakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Codebreakers [5] Leo Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide: a Codemaker's Story 1941-1945 (this is less about cryptography and more about the practical problems of secret code and ciphers during WWII). * The Thomas Jefferson wheel cipher or Bazeries Cylinder [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_disk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_disk [7] https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-03_OCR/page/n3/mode/2up?q=Bazeries https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-03_OCR/page/n3/mode... * The (once) unbreakable VIC cipher [7] David Kahn, Sci American, Vol 215, No 1 (July 1966), pp 38--47. [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIC_cipher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIC_cipher
- puzzledobserver 6y agoIs the argument that this is a simple procedure which yields recognizable English text? In other words, how does one confirm that this was indeed the encryption procedure originally used? I ask because there are similar procedures one can apply to other documents, but they have been dismissed as coincidental. Bible codes are the example which immediately come to mind.
- camjohnson26 6y agoThe odds that such a simple set of rules would create a message with no mistakes seem impossible. Bible codes just look for a short sequence of meaning hidden in chaos, ie a few 5 letter word patterns hidden in 1000 pages of gibberish, which are almost guaranteed to exist in any large body of text. In contrast this solution requires the whole message to make sense, which is much more entropy.
- ehsankia 6y agoOther than the fact that this method gives a full message, the message contains actual phrases which are very very relevant. For example "THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW" refers to someone who called a TV show 2 weeks before this letter was sent [0] pretending to by The Zodiac. Similarly, in that talk show, they discuss fear of "THE GAS CHAMBER", another phrase that appears. These two alone make it astronomically improbable that this is random. There are a couple other similar phrases, such as his common misspelling of Paradice, and him frequently referring to people he killed as his "SLAVES" in the afterlife. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yrtcRBTg-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yrtcRBTg-I (The talk show happened on October 22, 1969. The letter was sent on November 8, 1969.)
- agf 6y agoIn addition to the evidence cited in other replies, this solution has now been verified by the FBI, who has in the past dismissed other supposed "solutions" as the kind of thing you're talking about. The original report of the FBI's confirmation appears to be this SF Chronicle article: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Zodiac-340-cypher-cracked-by-code-expert-51-years-15794943.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Zodiac-340-cypher-...
- paulpauper 6y agoyet another unsolved problem solved with the aid of a computer. I do not think it would have been possible to solve it without a computer unless you were lucky enough to guess the rule
- WalterBright 6y agoLooks like obscurity is security worked for 50 years!
- escalt 6y agoI think that's mostly because only one short message was encoded with it (and it contained errors!). Would he send unique messages daily or write an entire book with it, I'm sure it would have been cracked much faster.
- ggm 6y agoMisspellings would probably be in the authors corpus otherwise: somebody should see "paradice" and go hmmmmm
- codesnik 6y agovideo shows just a weird positioning of letters, like that's how zodiac had put them into cypher (one down, three to the left). It seems to me that originally text was written in some geometric shape, mostly from top to bottom, then was copied to the paper from left to right. This could explain "mistakes", "life is" part written horizontally etc. I wonder, what the shape was.
- GhostVII 6y agoI think the Zodiac killer must have wanted this to be broken at some point, maybe they overestimated the difficulty though. It's not hard to make an unbreakable cipher (one time pad, or just doing a large number of transformations), seems like using a fairly simple method was an intentional choice. Or maybe they are just insane, but it doesn't make sense to me that you would actually try and securely encrypt something and then submit it to the public, if there is no target audience you might as well just send random characters.
- HexagonalKitten 6y agoI think they did want it broken, they seemed to treat everything like a game. My guess is that they didn't count on the errors and that made things much harder. The time to send random message is after the successful decryption of the first few. Drop a few hints in the early messages so that they're valuable to the police, then hit them with the time waster once they're hooked. Tell the public it has the answers and claim the cops aren't even trying, etc.