4 ms·

They aren’t in anyway exclusively Russian for the record but the Russians might be one of the last to still be using them in practice though. Not because it do

by mdhb 3y ago

They aren’t in anyway exclusively Russian for the record but the Russians might be one of the last to still be using them in practice though. Not because it doesn’t work but because it requires the end user to have access to specialist equipment which is quite unusual and hard to explain away and there are other ways to do the same thing that don’t have the same limitations. But just to be clear for anyone not familiar with this, what you’re hearing is the a message that was encoded using a one time pad and the reason it’s delivered in this quirky format is that it has certain properties that are ideal for clandestine work in dangerous areas where you need to pass a message over an open channel but you need to make sure that if anyone intercepts the message there is no information in there that will give any clues to the contents of the message or the intended recipient (I.e this second property is why encrypted email for example isn’t a suitable replacement). Beyond that there isn’t really anything that special about it. They are the two properties it provides and that’s the message it’s delivering. By way of a final example another famous one might be taking an ad in the classifieds section of a newspaper back in the day. The end user knows where to look and what message they are looking for but nobody beyond the sender and the recipient know that the ad is even a message with another meaning to begin with, unlike the numbers station example however, that wouldn’t be appropriate for sending key material or an OTP encoded message (it needs to be random data) or anything beyond a very simple and low bandwidth message (I.e the operation is ready to start).

metaxy2 3y ago
It really highlights the amazing security level of one time pads, that they can be comfortably doing secret announcements on a public radio channel with provably perfect security. (Assuming an adequate PRNG--for such small messages they could easily be using a hardware PRNG; I wonder.) Only issue is that you have to have all of your recipients keep track (and not leak) a pad that is at least as long as the data you intend to send.
- mdhb 3y ago
  Some other properties one time pads that might be less well known but are obvious when you think about them in the context of their use case. They are very cumbersome to use in real life, encrypting and decrypting is done by hand, it’s error prone as a result and very slow. Nobody likes using them at all. The part you mentioned about the keeping track of and not leaking it also isn’t really an issue so much in reality. What you hear on the radio isn’t actually that sensitive on its own hence why it’s happily sent in the clear without the key material to decipher it. The pads themselves are however highly guarded secrets, usually passed along via a dead drop, only ever exposed to the minimum of people and designed to be very easy to destroy quickly and are a bit flimsy as a result. But destroying the pad is a part of the whole “how to receive a message securely” process that they go through so it never exists to be used as evidence beyond the time that it’s actually useful. Also the people handling them are highly trained and trusted individuals who are extremely motivated to be very sensible while working with them as the entire reason you would use a method like this in particular is usually because you will be tortured and shot if discovered. This is ironically also why it doesn’t make sense usually for that person to have access to and know how to use a shortwave radio. If you get caught with that equipment your fate might be the same either way. Some fun trivia: the British as far back as the 50s I believe did have some success where they had developed a system that allowed them to essentially use direction finding techniques but for radios that were tuned to a specific frequency even if they weren’t transmitting. It was known as Operation Rafter and is on Wikipedia. One more example I’ll throw out there if you want to read a cool story is an account of how the ANC (the political group associated with Nelson Mandela) developed their own covert communications system with a lot of similar properties when they were trying to overthrow the apartheid government in South Africa during the 80s and 90s. It’s a great read https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv03445/04lv03996/05lv04001.htm https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv03445...
  - ezconnect 3y ago
    I think the British also invented a way to discover non paying public TV broadcast receiver driving around in van with the equipment.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      Maybe THAT is the reason why there is so much hush-hush about the detector vans?! If they used a technique which essentially was considered military secret not too long ago. (Compared to the time when the vans started to appear.)
    - mike_hearn 3y ago
      Supposedly the detector vans were a myth. A few appear to have been built, but they were essentially useless after 1950 as the interference from car ignitions started to become more of an issue. But the public didn't know that and the idea of it worked wonders for compliance. The BBC ran campaigns that implied huge fleets of them, but maybe there were only a few in reality. At some point the BBC were forced under FOIA to admit they'd never prosecuted anyone using evidence from detector vans.
  - MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
    > The pads themselves are however highly guarded secrets, usually passed along via a dead drop, only ever exposed to the minimum of people and designed to be very easy to destroy quickly and are a bit flimsy as a result. One other note here is that OTPs don’t have to be distributed in this manner. An OTP can use something already distributed and readily available to end users, such as a Gideon Bible or something (making sure to get the right edition, printing, etc) that everyone in a hotel room has access to. The key is having access to something, making sure it’s long enough for the series of messages to be encoded/decoded, and that no one else knows what it is.
    - mdhb 3y ago
      I’m not actually a crypto guy and I know of stories where people have done this in serious environments (check the link I posted above for an example) but my understanding is that non random letter distributions like you will find in a book for example will potentially change the level of security you can expect from a OTP substantially against a sophisticated enemy and as a result the randomness is actually very important regardless of key length. I might be wrong, it’s not my area of expertise.
zeristor 3y ago
I guess posting a specific message on Twitter does similar to a classified ad.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Twitter has the undesirable property that it's possible to find who is looking at a particular tweet (or user), unlike broadcast mediums such as radio or magazine classifieds, which present a much larger haystack.
- mdhb 3y ago
  A lot of botnets work this way where they will use something like Twitter or Reddit as a command and control channel but not a thing you would want to rely on if being identified might mean your life.
  - dabber 3y ago
    > A lot of botnets work this way where they will use something like Twitter or Reddit as a command and control channel but not a thing you would want to rely on if being identified might mean your life. For example, comments on Britney Spears' Instagram page: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/russian-hackers-turn-to-britney-spears-for-help-concealing-espionage-malware/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/russi...
saati 3y ago
A shortwave radio or an sdr dongle isn't that unusual to have.
- mdhb 3y ago
  It absolutely is if it doesn’t fit with the rest of your pattern of life. I think you need to understand the context here. This isn’t a scenario where a friend casually asks you what’s with the radio. This is where you are most likely going to have to have have a damn compelling reason why you have this while taking a beating from a team of very motivated counter intelligence professionals and your story needs to stand up to a huge amount of very detailed scrutiny under some pretty shitty circumstances. Usually by the time they know you have the radio depending on where you are you probably aren’t going home at that point. There’s a famous case of this called the TRIGON case when the US were doing this in the Cold War to communicate with a guy in the Soviet ministry of foreign affairs. There was no talking your way out of it once they knew the radio existed. There’s some interesting interviews with the CIA officers who were running him in Moscow at the time where they go into a lot of the details. Marti Peterson is the name of the person you should go looking for if you want to know more.
ughitsaaron 3y ago
Is this also the function of numbers stations? - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
- mdhb 3y ago
  I think we are talking about the same thing here.
  - ughitsaaron 3y ago
    My bad. The description early in the linked article didn’t sound familiar but reading a bit further they even use that term exactly.
ndiddy 3y ago
Like I said, this communications network is for military use, not clandestine use. There's no defined transmission schedule and the radio signals aren't transmitted at a high enough power for good signal strength outside Russia.
michaelcampbell 3y ago
This stuff fascinates me for some reason. I remember in high school a story I read about a telegraph operator that sent a message to someone from a local (who, according to the story was believed to be a spy) during WWII; something along the lines "FATHER IS DEAD." Later that day a reply came back, "IS FATHER DEAD OR DECEASED." That really amped up the fascination gene in me =D

by mdhb 3y ago

metaxy2 3y ago

It really highlights the amazing security level of one time pads, that they can be comfortably doing secret announcements on a public radio channel with provably perfect security. (Assuming an adequate PRNG--for such small messages they could easily be using a hardware PRNG; I wonder.) Only issue is that you have to have all of your recipients keep track (and not leak) a pad that is at least as long as the data you intend to send.

mdhb 3y ago
Some other properties one time pads that might be less well known but are obvious when you think about them in the context of their use case. They are very cumbersome to use in real life, encrypting and decrypting is done by hand, it’s error prone as a result and very slow. Nobody likes using them at all. The part you mentioned about the keeping track of and not leaking it also isn’t really an issue so much in reality. What you hear on the radio isn’t actually that sensitive on its own hence why it’s happily sent in the clear without the key material to decipher it. The pads themselves are however highly guarded secrets, usually passed along via a dead drop, only ever exposed to the minimum of people and designed to be very easy to destroy quickly and are a bit flimsy as a result. But destroying the pad is a part of the whole “how to receive a message securely” process that they go through so it never exists to be used as evidence beyond the time that it’s actually useful. Also the people handling them are highly trained and trusted individuals who are extremely motivated to be very sensible while working with them as the entire reason you would use a method like this in particular is usually because you will be tortured and shot if discovered. This is ironically also why it doesn’t make sense usually for that person to have access to and know how to use a shortwave radio. If you get caught with that equipment your fate might be the same either way. Some fun trivia: the British as far back as the 50s I believe did have some success where they had developed a system that allowed them to essentially use direction finding techniques but for radios that were tuned to a specific frequency even if they weren’t transmitting. It was known as Operation Rafter and is on Wikipedia. One more example I’ll throw out there if you want to read a cool story is an account of how the ANC (the political group associated with Nelson Mandela) developed their own covert communications system with a lot of similar properties when they were trying to overthrow the apartheid government in South Africa during the 80s and 90s. It’s a great read https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv03445/04lv03996/05lv04001.htm https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv03445...
- ezconnect 3y ago
  I think the British also invented a way to discover non paying public TV broadcast receiver driving around in van with the equipment.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Maybe THAT is the reason why there is so much hush-hush about the detector vans?! If they used a technique which essentially was considered military secret not too long ago. (Compared to the time when the vans started to appear.)
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    Supposedly the detector vans were a myth. A few appear to have been built, but they were essentially useless after 1950 as the interference from car ignitions started to become more of an issue. But the public didn't know that and the idea of it worked wonders for compliance. The BBC ran campaigns that implied huge fleets of them, but maybe there were only a few in reality. At some point the BBC were forced under FOIA to admit they'd never prosecuted anyone using evidence from detector vans.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
  > The pads themselves are however highly guarded secrets, usually passed along via a dead drop, only ever exposed to the minimum of people and designed to be very easy to destroy quickly and are a bit flimsy as a result. One other note here is that OTPs don’t have to be distributed in this manner. An OTP can use something already distributed and readily available to end users, such as a Gideon Bible or something (making sure to get the right edition, printing, etc) that everyone in a hotel room has access to. The key is having access to something, making sure it’s long enough for the series of messages to be encoded/decoded, and that no one else knows what it is.
  - mdhb 3y ago
    I’m not actually a crypto guy and I know of stories where people have done this in serious environments (check the link I posted above for an example) but my understanding is that non random letter distributions like you will find in a book for example will potentially change the level of security you can expect from a OTP substantially against a sophisticated enemy and as a result the randomness is actually very important regardless of key length. I might be wrong, it’s not my area of expertise.

zeristor 3y ago

I guess posting a specific message on Twitter does similar to a classified ad.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
Twitter has the undesirable property that it's possible to find who is looking at a particular tweet (or user), unlike broadcast mediums such as radio or magazine classifieds, which present a much larger haystack.
mdhb 3y ago
A lot of botnets work this way where they will use something like Twitter or Reddit as a command and control channel but not a thing you would want to rely on if being identified might mean your life.
- dabber 3y ago
  > A lot of botnets work this way where they will use something like Twitter or Reddit as a command and control channel but not a thing you would want to rely on if being identified might mean your life. For example, comments on Britney Spears' Instagram page: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/russian-hackers-turn-to-britney-spears-for-help-concealing-espionage-malware/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/russi...

saati 3y ago

A shortwave radio or an sdr dongle isn't that unusual to have.

mdhb 3y ago
It absolutely is if it doesn’t fit with the rest of your pattern of life. I think you need to understand the context here. This isn’t a scenario where a friend casually asks you what’s with the radio. This is where you are most likely going to have to have have a damn compelling reason why you have this while taking a beating from a team of very motivated counter intelligence professionals and your story needs to stand up to a huge amount of very detailed scrutiny under some pretty shitty circumstances. Usually by the time they know you have the radio depending on where you are you probably aren’t going home at that point. There’s a famous case of this called the TRIGON case when the US were doing this in the Cold War to communicate with a guy in the Soviet ministry of foreign affairs. There was no talking your way out of it once they knew the radio existed. There’s some interesting interviews with the CIA officers who were running him in Moscow at the time where they go into a lot of the details. Marti Peterson is the name of the person you should go looking for if you want to know more.

ughitsaaron 3y ago

Is this also the function of numbers stations? - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station

mdhb 3y ago
I think we are talking about the same thing here.
- ughitsaaron 3y ago
  My bad. The description early in the linked article didn’t sound familiar but reading a bit further they even use that term exactly.

ndiddy 3y ago

Like I said, this communications network is for military use, not clandestine use. There's no defined transmission schedule and the radio signals aren't transmitted at a high enough power for good signal strength outside Russia.

michaelcampbell 3y ago

This stuff fascinates me for some reason. I remember in high school a story I read about a telegraph operator that sent a message to someone from a local (who, according to the story was believed to be a spy) during WWII; something along the lines "FATHER IS DEAD." Later that day a reply came back, "IS FATHER DEAD OR DECEASED." That really amped up the fascination gene in me =D