7 ms·

Digital forgeries are hard

213 points by ingve 3y ago

bell-cot 3y ago
Reality: Casual forgery is pretty easy. Forgery that will stand up to expert examination is very hard. And impossible if you're a bungling incompetent, as this guy seems to be.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nullc 3y ago
  A thing to keep in mind is that many of these forgeries Wright has successfully been using for a number of years. They fooled people! "If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid". One thing I've realized during the case is that the kind of scrutiny people apply when they get handed a document as "proof" is not the same as the scrutiny they'd apply if handed a document they know is fake and they simply need to find proof. In the former case people just tend to confirmation bias themselves, they check a few things and say "yep checks out". While in the latter case, they'll much more quickly say "well if it's authentic, then all the version numbers should check out, lemme go check those". The former kind of check is almost completely ineffective against an intentional forgery unless it was made by someone dramatically less competent that you. Validation for "proof" sake must use the second process of assuming it false and looking for the evidence of it. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with accepting a document on its face, but you shouldn't deceive yourself that you've validated something. If someone is giving you a document to prove something then you have to accept a serious possibility that it was fake, otherwise why bother looking at the document at all?
Macha 3y ago
There's also been a few cases over the years of forged documents being spotted by changing MS Word font defaults: One example: https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/pakistan/calibri-controversy---how-calibri-font-exposed-wrongdoings-of-sharifs-daughter-1.2057633 https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/pakistan/calibri-controversy...
- gjvnq 3y ago
  Skill issue. They could've easily used Times New Roman like their teachers probably instructed them. /hj
hammock 3y ago
I'm reminded of the theory that the 2017 DNC email leak was forged to look like it had come from a Russian, when a deeper analysis suggested it had come via local thumb drive: https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2017/08/23/exclusive-nsa-whistleblower-russia-hack-dnc-server-outright-lie/ https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2017/08/23/exclusive-n...
- pvg 3y ago
  There is this theory of the Moebius. A twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop from which there is no escape.
  - woah 3y ago
    Imagine repeating the same day as a Hillary '16 campaign staffer over and over for eternity
- PoignardAzur 3y ago
  IIRC the fishing link used for the hack pointed to a mainstream URL shortener; and the account that owned that shortened URL used in the fishing op was associated with other URLs dating years back used for fishing campaigns against russian journalists and dissidents. Hence, pretty strong reasons to suspect Russian state involvment.
  - hammock 3y ago
    Are you thinking of this story? https://www.wired.com/2017/05/russian-hackers-using-tainted-leaks-sow-disinformation/ https://www.wired.com/2017/05/russian-hackers-using-tainted-... Those phishing emails and links are distinct from the DNC leak
    - PoignardAzur 3y ago
      I was thinking about another case around the same time where a DNC member had his gmail account compromised by a spearfishing attack (which IIUC is also different from the "DNC leak"). The broad strokes are similar though.
BoppreH 3y ago
I wonder why we don't have better (widely trusted and used) timestamping services. It has always been easy to prove that something happened after a certain time: take a photo of today's newspaper, mention stock prices, etc. But proving that an event happened before a certain time, like in the article, is a lot harder. You can send someone an email through a trusted gateway, but people can only check by having access to that mailbox, or trusting the person who has access. And I know about PKI timestamping, but I've never seen them used for legal cases, maybe because the complexity erodes trust. Are there any good solutions that would convince a non-technical judge? Edit: I remember Twitter[1] being used for this purpose, but I don't know if today I'd trust a hash dropped there, given how much it's evolving and/or struggling. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26609183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26609183
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  Don’t know how convincing it’d be in court, but Open Timestamps[1], a free service that operates by publishing Merkle tree hashes to the Bitcoin ledger and can give you independently-verifiable proofs after a while, still exists even if it doesn’t seem to be under active development. (I think Keybase tried something like that some time ago as well, they already had most of the parts in place, but then they decided to use their own something-or-other-coin and I stopped paying attention.) [1] https://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/
  - vintermann 3y ago
    A good example of using bitcoin for something that was entirely possible with regular old public key cryptography. Matthew Richardson's Stamper has been running since 1995.
    - rstuart4133 3y ago
      > Matthew Richardson's Stamper That was hard to find. My first google searches turn up this post. Here it is, in case anyone is interested: https://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper/stampinf.htm https://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper/stampinf.htm In the end both are just digital signatures, and so are "entirely possible with regular old public key cryptography" as you say. You can achieve a similar effect by sending a gmail message to yourself with an sha256 of the document in the subject. The subject and date are included in the gmail DKIM signature. The cryptographic primitives used by Stamper, gmail DKIM and bitcoin are equally secure as a first approximation. That means the security ultimately rests on the security of the key used to sign it. So do you trust Matthew Richardson to keep is gpg key secure, or Google to keep their DKIM secure, or the difficulty imposed by a proof of work where the amount of work is equal to a nation states electricity supply? I know which I'd choose out of those three, and that's the key differentiator of bitcoin. It is not the cryptographic primitives used.
alilleybrinker 3y ago
(Assuming this is the same case; I haven't been following Craig Wright closely) It looks like the case was very swiftly decided against Wright. Here's reporting from The Guardian about it today: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/14/australian-craig-wright-not-bitcoin-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-high-court-rules https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/14/australia...
- toyg 3y ago
  I always wonder about people like Wright... how does such a brain work? Why would one invest so much of his life and reputation on brazen lies and forgeries? He's been caught so many times, surely nobody can take him seriously anymore, it's over, time to move on - but here he is, forging emails and logs, digging deeper and deeper, turning his life more and more into a farce. Why?
  - Analemma_ 3y ago
    There's pretty broad consensus that Craig Wright is a pathological liar. And I'm not using that as an idiom for "dishonest person", I mean it in the psychiatric term of art sense [0]: he probably has an actual compulsion to lie stemming from some kind of psychological damage, which doesn't stop even when he's caught red-handed (he just invents new even more outrageous lies, even when that's nakedly against his own self-interest). This is confirmed not just by all his behavior re: Bitcoin, but his own mother said at one point he has been like this his whole life. It's. In earlier days of Bitcoin it was causing actual problems, but these days everyone treats him as a carnival amusement and nothing more. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_lying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_lying
    - bitnorbert 3y ago
      A bunch of bitcoin developers are still facing lawsuits from him, and it still requires a ton of attention from them and is causing them anguish. He may not keep launching lawsuits against random community members, but one of them still has one appeal case and one separate lawsuit against him, for having been mean to him on Twitter. It's true that most people consider Wright a silly clown these days, but the chilling effect against Bitcoin development is hard to quantify and, I think, wholly real. This is why his latest loss makes today a good day.
lolc 3y ago
Wow this guy is a prolific forger! Not knowing the details of the case, doesn't he risk getting a book thrown at him for introducing forged evidence?
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Yes. He is at grave risk of the Crown Prosecution Service making an example of him, which could result in jail time.
  - shmeeed 3y ago
    No doubt he expects to be able to talk his way out of that.
malux85 3y ago
Holy smokes isn’t forging evidence a crime? Even if it’s hard to prove exactly that he did it, there’s a strong motive and means and a lot of pretty shocking evidence of forgery here.
- bitnorbert 3y ago
  He left court on a Friday, did the email forgery in the article over the weekend, and was back in court on Monday. Forging evidence is always bad, but doing it during the trial in response to something he was cross-examined on? That has to be particularly bad.
  - nullc 3y ago
    Not just that, but he attempted to plant the forgery in the mailbox of his former legal representation! Maybe that won't be treated as seriously as it should be because people don't realize that it very much could have worked!
ryan-c 3y ago
This is about Faketoshi Notamoto, right? click Yup. This guy is a pathological forger and is bad at it. Here's my write-up from when he got caught doing naughty things with ECDSA: https://rya.nc/sartre.html https://rya.nc/sartre.html (as noted by another commenter, "pathological" is literal in this case)
- rwmj 3y ago
  The weird thing is being bad at it hasn't stopped him. (That and there's some billionaire behind the whole thing, which probably helps.) This article was interesting: https://rorycellanjones.substack.com/p/the-battle-of-bitcoin https://rorycellanjones.substack.com/p/the-battle-of-bitcoin
  - ryan-c 3y ago
    > The weird thing is being bad at it hasn't stopped him. "pathological" I think it's literally a compulsion for him.
- ixwt 3y ago
  Wouldn't it be trivially easy to prove that oneself is Satoshi Nakamoto? Just signing arbitrary messages with one of the many wallet addresses from the first Bitcoins mined? Assuming of course, that those early keys didn't end up like so many: on a hard drive, in a land fill.
  - ghostpepper 3y ago
    He claims he destroyed the keys while medicated after being released from hospital https://twitter.com/bitnorbert/status/1757745072974475270 https://twitter.com/bitnorbert/status/1757745072974475270
    - thwarted 3y ago
      It's unfortunate that this is annoying to read with having to expand each entry and then the content popping back up to the top. Annoying enough that I lost interest in reading it. YMMV.
1-6 3y ago
Craig Wright sounds like a bad liar
- bitnorbert 3y ago
  In my opinion, he's a conman, as in confidence man. His lies aren't high quality, but he tells them with great confidence, which sadly is appealing to many people. He can answer any accusation on the spot without hesitation. He's vague, so you kind of feel like what he just said contradicted something he said earlier, but most people's reaction is that they must have misunderstood him earlier. He's very good at technobabble; if you don't know that much about technical stuff, he can come off as highly knowledgeable. He will use emotion as necessary. Over the eight years he's been at this, he has built up a cult following of people who worship the ground he walks on and will defend him ferociously at every opportunity. Yes, he's a bad liar, but very few people can do what he does.
- nullc 3y ago
  You likely haven't witnessed him in person. For subjects he is expecting his lies are delivered with perfect fluidity and almost messianic confidence. He easily slips into raw belligerence that absolutely shuts down most people. He is an expert at statements that brim with sound and fury but which signify nothing, and so although they covey some impression their content leaves nothing to falsify. He immediately deceives many people. Some of his approach is polarizing, particularly the technobabbling-- people either fall hard for him or see right through him-- but generally a conman only needs to fool some people, not everyone. The technobabbling even sometimes works on technical people, particularly when they go in pre-awed by him, they assume that misunderstandings are errors on their part. Like if you met Knuth and asked him a question and he replied with a bunch of jargon you've barely heard about but it doesn't really sound right... you're not going to suddenly start thinking he's a big fake, right? you're going to assume you're the clueless one.
bitxbitxbitcoin 3y ago
Just Ask Craig Wright.
reaperman 3y ago
This reminds me of a paper[0] whose thesis is "We enumerate the requirements that a censorship-resistant system must satisfy to successfully mimic another protocol and conclude that “unobservability by imitation” is a fundamentally flawed approach." It relates to censorship-resistant communication systems such as SkypeMorph, StegoTorus, and CensorSpoofer which aim to evade censors’ observations by imitating common protocols like Skype and HTTP. This is essentially "digital forgery" at the protocol level. I wonder if the thesis could be shown to be generalizable to most digital forgery, or even forgery in general. 0: https://people.cs.umass.edu/~amir/papers/parrot.pdf https://people.cs.umass.edu/~amir/papers/parrot.pdf
nullc 3y ago
This is a great point that hasn't been aired enough. I'm thrilled to see outsiders reading the expert reports-- which are themselves fascinating reading. I'm one of Wright's defendants and have spent the last several years of my life trapped in this involuntary puzzle hunt. Often people read the conclusions on the documents and say "man this guy Wright is a total idiot"-- and while I don't disagree with the sentiment, it's the wrong conclusion to draw from the documents. These debunks seem simple once they've been pointed out to you. But the problem that a forger has is that they must get EVERYTHING exactly right. The anti-forger, on the other hand, need only identify one solid flaw. Wright's stupidity wasn't so much in any particular error (okay, well a couple were kinda dumb: like backdating documents by robotically replacing all past tense with future tense, turning him into nostradumbass.)-- but the scale meant that it was inevitable the he would make errors. Unfortunately he's been learning and for the most part his later forgeries had a lot less metadata to go on. If he gets too many more tries he may be able to start producing unfalsifiable forgeries. I'm really homing the judgement is forceful enough to meaningfully shut him down.
- mjg59 3y ago
  Thanks! The quality of the expert witness statements is astonishing, and the sheer scale of the work carried out in a relatively short period of time is something I just can't imagine. Do you know if there's any likelihood of the opposition's expert witness statements (or Craig's remaining witness statements) being made public?
  - nullc 3y ago
    They'll be made public. They're also good, though I think you'll agree ours are more interesting-- as our side found close to a strict superset of issues. I think in particular the Lynch (one of Wright's expert) report on the LaTeX files is interesting because it took a different approach than Rosendahl -- so it wasn't as duplicative: Rosendahl tried using legacy tools against the files, Lynch used current tools the combination was particularly fatal to Wright because if only one approach had been used Wright would have claimed that the other approach would have produced results that supported his case. (Rosendahls' report itself is a great work in its own right, in spite of being a LaTeX user for >20 years I learned quite a few things from it). I wish we'd gotten access to Wright's 22 million lines of chatgpt traffic since September, that might have been particularly interesting! -- the abuse of LLM's in the case is itself something of public interest that sadly wasn't adequately ventilated in the trial because we weren't able to get the relevant records. But there were pretty good indications that Wright used ChatGPT directly to create forgeries, aid in the construction of other forgeries, and to pad out his witness statements in a bit of a volumetric attack. The Bitcoin legal defense fund has tried to get out most of what it could lawfully put out, -- skipping a few things with privacy issues-- but once the trial started the priority shifted to managing the case. The default openness of the US courts may well have been the real hero in all this: documents and statements made public in the kleiman case boxed wright in from every angle. Its important that materials from this case are made public because it may not, unfortunately, be the last we hear from wright. Even where the US case didn't make some things public, it make their existence public which in some cases enabled us to obtain them: e.g. we were able to get all of Gavin's communications with Satoshi which had previously been provided to Wright and whose existence Wright tried desperately and ultimately unsuccessfully to deny. The UK court openness is less by default, but the parties have a substantial ability to publish things-- allowing the parties to get things much closer to US practices.
esafak 3y ago
A more serious case of this took place in Turkey two decades ago, and involved the jailing of a significant fraction of the military leadership. So it amounted to a judicial coup against the military. The son-in-law of one of the generals (Cetin Dogan) analyzed a piece of the evidence, a Word document ostensibly dated 2003, and proved that it contained anachronisms dating it to at least 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledgehammer_(alleged_coup_plan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledgehammer_(alleged_coup_pla...
- Dwedit 3y ago
  Turkish Rathergate?
- nuclearnice1 3y ago
  Interesting. I did not know about this case. We had a similar thing in Pakistan. In fact, same font. https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/pakistan/how-calibri-font-brought-down-the-nawaz-sharif-government-1.2065614 https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/pakistan/how-calibri-font-br...
- hilbert42 3y ago
  You'd think by now that everyone—especially those who'd intend forging documents—would be aware of the 'mismatched' font problem but it appears not because it's happened in significant numbers of high profile cases in the past. Simply, these forgers haven't done their necessary homework. Even with homework done I'd never attempt it for the same reasons that Matthew Garrett outlined in his article. However, assume a hypothetical case where I had to forge a document what would I do? My first thought would be to obtain a pensioned-off PC complete with operating system, user apps such as MS Office/Word and standard default fonts that was last used a little before the date of my intended forgery. Obtaining such a PC may seem like a tall order but it might not be as difficult as it seems, but it certainly won't be easy. I say that it's possible by just looking at my own situation. In my shed I have a stack of old PCs gathering dust that haven't been switched on in several decades, no doubt there are many similar piles of junk out there in user-land that can be tapped for a suitable PC. Next, I'd ensure the PC was not switched on until I'd removed the hard disk and forensically mirrored it to a backup on another PC. The mirrored disk image can then be examined to determine the exact date when it was last used, etc., etc. Without reinstalling the hard disk and before switching it on I'd disconnect the PC's clock battery and or short out the clock operation so the clock was set to the factory default time (I.e. not set). I'd then switch on and set the date in the BIOS slightly ahead of the last date the PC was last switched on (that date I'll have already determined from my forensic analysis of the mirrored image). After reinstalling the HD I'd switch on and hopefully I'd have functional PC whose date and time would indicate that it was switched on shortly after the actual time it was last used. At this point and before proceeding further I'd take another mirror image of the HD and compare it with the original for any gotchas. Unless something goes awry I'll use this second mirror for all future installations and any necessary tweaks. My next step would be to draft out the forged text by hand on paper. I'd study this text with great care to ensure that I've the precise wording and that there are no references to forward dates or events that could not have happened by the date of the forgery. I'll then sit on the text for 24 hours or more to think about it just to make sure that everything I've written is as 'faultless' as is possible. Assuming all's well and only then will I switch on the PC and use the installed copy of MSO/Word with one of the common already-installed typefaces such as Ariel or Times New Roman to type my text. Even then, with all that done, I'd still be shitting myself that I'd not fully covered my tracks! Note: that's the short version, there are many other intermediate checks too detailed to mention here. Some of these steps may require minor tweaks to the second mirror (metadata changes, etc.) before it's mirrored back to the original HD. Any edits to the second mirror should only be done after it's been backed up. Doing these checks and ensuring that one's covered one's tracks isn't for the feinthearted. Right, the stakes have to be extraordinarily high to even bother attempting such a job. _ Edit: if the forgery is to appear in printed form then it should be printed on old stock paper with a printer of the same era, say a HP LaserJet III for instance. Even with expertise, artificially aging such a document is a complicated process and even then it's unlikely to pass muster with a basic forensic analysis. Another approach is to do the above then photocopy the original then 'lose' it and only use the copy. Recopying the copy on multiple machines of different brands will make tracing the original photocopier more difficult as each machine will have optics with minor distortions that are different to one another. Faxing the document sans headers will further obfuscate where the copy originated as faxes are of low resolution and introduce artifacts noise, but keep in mind that the mechanics and optics of fax machines introduce the same type of distortions as photocopiers. Again, don't bet your chances, if you use these methods then smart forensics are still likely to nab you.
mcdonje 3y ago
Interesting article, but the headline seems dubious. What's the opposite of survivorship bias? Because it seems like the population of good forgeries would be hard to quantify.
- kelnos 3y ago
  I don't think the premise that digital forgeries are hard is invalidated by the possibility that there might be a good number of undetected forgeries out there. Things can be hard to do, but still done in decent quantities. You do make a good general point, though! Good forgeries are by their nature not known to be forgeries.
userbinator 3y ago
They are only hard for those who get caught... ;-) The flip side of this is how difficult it is to avoid tracking and hidden metadata.
qweqwe14 3y ago
Surprised that noone mentioned Barely Sociable video on Satoshi Nakamoto[1] (last of a 3-part series). Pretty strong arguments as to why Adam Back is Satoshi, the amount of coincidences is just way too many IMO. Craig Wright is definitely not Satoshi, the guy has some issues and so keeps claiming that he is. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
It was amusing that this story and the key fob story were on the front page at the same time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39701931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39701931

213 points by ingve 3y ago

Reality: Casual forgery is pretty easy. Forgery that will stand up to expert examination is very hard. And impossible if you're a bungling incompetent, as this guy seems to be.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nullc 3y ago
A thing to keep in mind is that many of these forgeries Wright has successfully been using for a number of years. They fooled people! "If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid". One thing I've realized during the case is that the kind of scrutiny people apply when they get handed a document as "proof" is not the same as the scrutiny they'd apply if handed a document they know is fake and they simply need to find proof. In the former case people just tend to confirmation bias themselves, they check a few things and say "yep checks out". While in the latter case, they'll much more quickly say "well if it's authentic, then all the version numbers should check out, lemme go check those". The former kind of check is almost completely ineffective against an intentional forgery unless it was made by someone dramatically less competent that you. Validation for "proof" sake must use the second process of assuming it false and looking for the evidence of it. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with accepting a document on its face, but you shouldn't deceive yourself that you've validated something. If someone is giving you a document to prove something then you have to accept a serious possibility that it was fake, otherwise why bother looking at the document at all?

Macha 3y ago

There's also been a few cases over the years of forged documents being spotted by changing MS Word font defaults: One example: https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/pakistan/calibri-controversy---how-calibri-font-exposed-wrongdoings-of-sharifs-daughter-1.2057633 https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/pakistan/calibri-controversy...

gjvnq 3y ago
Skill issue. They could've easily used Times New Roman like their teachers probably instructed them. /hj

hammock 3y ago

I'm reminded of the theory that the 2017 DNC email leak was forged to look like it had come from a Russian, when a deeper analysis suggested it had come via local thumb drive: https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2017/08/23/exclusive-nsa-whistleblower-russia-hack-dnc-server-outright-lie/ https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2017/08/23/exclusive-n...

pvg 3y ago
There is this theory of the Moebius. A twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop from which there is no escape.
- woah 3y ago
  Imagine repeating the same day as a Hillary '16 campaign staffer over and over for eternity
PoignardAzur 3y ago
IIRC the fishing link used for the hack pointed to a mainstream URL shortener; and the account that owned that shortened URL used in the fishing op was associated with other URLs dating years back used for fishing campaigns against russian journalists and dissidents. Hence, pretty strong reasons to suspect Russian state involvment.
- hammock 3y ago
  Are you thinking of this story? https://www.wired.com/2017/05/russian-hackers-using-tainted-leaks-sow-disinformation/ https://www.wired.com/2017/05/russian-hackers-using-tainted-... Those phishing emails and links are distinct from the DNC leak
  - PoignardAzur 3y ago
    I was thinking about another case around the same time where a DNC member had his gmail account compromised by a spearfishing attack (which IIUC is also different from the "DNC leak"). The broad strokes are similar though.

BoppreH 3y ago

I wonder why we don't have better (widely trusted and used) timestamping services. It has always been easy to prove that something happened after a certain time: take a photo of today's newspaper, mention stock prices, etc. But proving that an event happened before a certain time, like in the article, is a lot harder. You can send someone an email through a trusted gateway, but people can only check by having access to that mailbox, or trusting the person who has access. And I know about PKI timestamping, but I've never seen them used for legal cases, maybe because the complexity erodes trust. Are there any good solutions that would convince a non-technical judge? Edit: I remember Twitter[1] being used for this purpose, but I don't know if today I'd trust a hash dropped there, given how much it's evolving and/or struggling. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26609183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26609183

mananaysiempre 3y ago
Don’t know how convincing it’d be in court, but Open Timestamps[1], a free service that operates by publishing Merkle tree hashes to the Bitcoin ledger and can give you independently-verifiable proofs after a while, still exists even if it doesn’t seem to be under active development. (I think Keybase tried something like that some time ago as well, they already had most of the parts in place, but then they decided to use their own something-or-other-coin and I stopped paying attention.) [1] https://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/
- vintermann 3y ago
  A good example of using bitcoin for something that was entirely possible with regular old public key cryptography. Matthew Richardson's Stamper has been running since 1995.
  - rstuart4133 3y ago
    > Matthew Richardson's Stamper That was hard to find. My first google searches turn up this post. Here it is, in case anyone is interested: https://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper/stampinf.htm https://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper/stampinf.htm In the end both are just digital signatures, and so are "entirely possible with regular old public key cryptography" as you say. You can achieve a similar effect by sending a gmail message to yourself with an sha256 of the document in the subject. The subject and date are included in the gmail DKIM signature. The cryptographic primitives used by Stamper, gmail DKIM and bitcoin are equally secure as a first approximation. That means the security ultimately rests on the security of the key used to sign it. So do you trust Matthew Richardson to keep is gpg key secure, or Google to keep their DKIM secure, or the difficulty imposed by a proof of work where the amount of work is equal to a nation states electricity supply? I know which I'd choose out of those three, and that's the key differentiator of bitcoin. It is not the cryptographic primitives used.

alilleybrinker 3y ago

(Assuming this is the same case; I haven't been following Craig Wright closely) It looks like the case was very swiftly decided against Wright. Here's reporting from The Guardian about it today: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/14/australian-craig-wright-not-bitcoin-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-high-court-rules https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/14/australia...

toyg 3y ago
I always wonder about people like Wright... how does such a brain work? Why would one invest so much of his life and reputation on brazen lies and forgeries? He's been caught so many times, surely nobody can take him seriously anymore, it's over, time to move on - but here he is, forging emails and logs, digging deeper and deeper, turning his life more and more into a farce. Why?
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  There's pretty broad consensus that Craig Wright is a pathological liar. And I'm not using that as an idiom for "dishonest person", I mean it in the psychiatric term of art sense [0]: he probably has an actual compulsion to lie stemming from some kind of psychological damage, which doesn't stop even when he's caught red-handed (he just invents new even more outrageous lies, even when that's nakedly against his own self-interest). This is confirmed not just by all his behavior re: Bitcoin, but his own mother said at one point he has been like this his whole life. It's. In earlier days of Bitcoin it was causing actual problems, but these days everyone treats him as a carnival amusement and nothing more. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_lying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_lying
  - bitnorbert 3y ago
    A bunch of bitcoin developers are still facing lawsuits from him, and it still requires a ton of attention from them and is causing them anguish. He may not keep launching lawsuits against random community members, but one of them still has one appeal case and one separate lawsuit against him, for having been mean to him on Twitter. It's true that most people consider Wright a silly clown these days, but the chilling effect against Bitcoin development is hard to quantify and, I think, wholly real. This is why his latest loss makes today a good day.

lolc 3y ago

Wow this guy is a prolific forger! Not knowing the details of the case, doesn't he risk getting a book thrown at him for introducing forged evidence?

mike_hearn 3y ago
Yes. He is at grave risk of the Crown Prosecution Service making an example of him, which could result in jail time.
- shmeeed 3y ago
  No doubt he expects to be able to talk his way out of that.

malux85 3y ago

Holy smokes isn’t forging evidence a crime? Even if it’s hard to prove exactly that he did it, there’s a strong motive and means and a lot of pretty shocking evidence of forgery here.

bitnorbert 3y ago
He left court on a Friday, did the email forgery in the article over the weekend, and was back in court on Monday. Forging evidence is always bad, but doing it during the trial in response to something he was cross-examined on? That has to be particularly bad.
- nullc 3y ago
  Not just that, but he attempted to plant the forgery in the mailbox of his former legal representation! Maybe that won't be treated as seriously as it should be because people don't realize that it very much could have worked!

ryan-c 3y ago

This is about Faketoshi Notamoto, right? click Yup. This guy is a pathological forger and is bad at it. Here's my write-up from when he got caught doing naughty things with ECDSA: https://rya.nc/sartre.html https://rya.nc/sartre.html (as noted by another commenter, "pathological" is literal in this case)

rwmj 3y ago
The weird thing is being bad at it hasn't stopped him. (That and there's some billionaire behind the whole thing, which probably helps.) This article was interesting: https://rorycellanjones.substack.com/p/the-battle-of-bitcoin https://rorycellanjones.substack.com/p/the-battle-of-bitcoin
- ryan-c 3y ago
  > The weird thing is being bad at it hasn't stopped him. "pathological" I think it's literally a compulsion for him.
ixwt 3y ago
Wouldn't it be trivially easy to prove that oneself is Satoshi Nakamoto? Just signing arbitrary messages with one of the many wallet addresses from the first Bitcoins mined? Assuming of course, that those early keys didn't end up like so many: on a hard drive, in a land fill.
- ghostpepper 3y ago
  He claims he destroyed the keys while medicated after being released from hospital https://twitter.com/bitnorbert/status/1757745072974475270 https://twitter.com/bitnorbert/status/1757745072974475270
  - thwarted 3y ago
    It's unfortunate that this is annoying to read with having to expand each entry and then the content popping back up to the top. Annoying enough that I lost interest in reading it. YMMV.

1-6 3y ago

Craig Wright sounds like a bad liar

bitnorbert 3y ago
In my opinion, he's a conman, as in confidence man. His lies aren't high quality, but he tells them with great confidence, which sadly is appealing to many people. He can answer any accusation on the spot without hesitation. He's vague, so you kind of feel like what he just said contradicted something he said earlier, but most people's reaction is that they must have misunderstood him earlier. He's very good at technobabble; if you don't know that much about technical stuff, he can come off as highly knowledgeable. He will use emotion as necessary. Over the eight years he's been at this, he has built up a cult following of people who worship the ground he walks on and will defend him ferociously at every opportunity. Yes, he's a bad liar, but very few people can do what he does.
nullc 3y ago
You likely haven't witnessed him in person. For subjects he is expecting his lies are delivered with perfect fluidity and almost messianic confidence. He easily slips into raw belligerence that absolutely shuts down most people. He is an expert at statements that brim with sound and fury but which signify nothing, and so although they covey some impression their content leaves nothing to falsify. He immediately deceives many people. Some of his approach is polarizing, particularly the technobabbling-- people either fall hard for him or see right through him-- but generally a conman only needs to fool some people, not everyone. The technobabbling even sometimes works on technical people, particularly when they go in pre-awed by him, they assume that misunderstandings are errors on their part. Like if you met Knuth and asked him a question and he replied with a bunch of jargon you've barely heard about but it doesn't really sound right... you're not going to suddenly start thinking he's a big fake, right? you're going to assume you're the clueless one.

bitxbitxbitcoin 3y ago

Just Ask Craig Wright.

reaperman 3y ago

This reminds me of a paper[0] whose thesis is "We enumerate the requirements that a censorship-resistant system must satisfy to successfully mimic another protocol and conclude that “unobservability by imitation” is a fundamentally flawed approach." It relates to censorship-resistant communication systems such as SkypeMorph, StegoTorus, and CensorSpoofer which aim to evade censors’ observations by imitating common protocols like Skype and HTTP. This is essentially "digital forgery" at the protocol level. I wonder if the thesis could be shown to be generalizable to most digital forgery, or even forgery in general. 0: https://people.cs.umass.edu/~amir/papers/parrot.pdf https://people.cs.umass.edu/~amir/papers/parrot.pdf

nullc 3y ago

This is a great point that hasn't been aired enough. I'm thrilled to see outsiders reading the expert reports-- which are themselves fascinating reading. I'm one of Wright's defendants and have spent the last several years of my life trapped in this involuntary puzzle hunt. Often people read the conclusions on the documents and say "man this guy Wright is a total idiot"-- and while I don't disagree with the sentiment, it's the wrong conclusion to draw from the documents. These debunks seem simple once they've been pointed out to you. But the problem that a forger has is that they must get EVERYTHING exactly right. The anti-forger, on the other hand, need only identify one solid flaw. Wright's stupidity wasn't so much in any particular error (okay, well a couple were kinda dumb: like backdating documents by robotically replacing all past tense with future tense, turning him into nostradumbass.)-- but the scale meant that it was inevitable the he would make errors. Unfortunately he's been learning and for the most part his later forgeries had a lot less metadata to go on. If he gets too many more tries he may be able to start producing unfalsifiable forgeries. I'm really homing the judgement is forceful enough to meaningfully shut him down.

mjg59 3y ago
Thanks! The quality of the expert witness statements is astonishing, and the sheer scale of the work carried out in a relatively short period of time is something I just can't imagine. Do you know if there's any likelihood of the opposition's expert witness statements (or Craig's remaining witness statements) being made public?
- nullc 3y ago
  They'll be made public. They're also good, though I think you'll agree ours are more interesting-- as our side found close to a strict superset of issues. I think in particular the Lynch (one of Wright's expert) report on the LaTeX files is interesting because it took a different approach than Rosendahl -- so it wasn't as duplicative: Rosendahl tried using legacy tools against the files, Lynch used current tools the combination was particularly fatal to Wright because if only one approach had been used Wright would have claimed that the other approach would have produced results that supported his case. (Rosendahls' report itself is a great work in its own right, in spite of being a LaTeX user for >20 years I learned quite a few things from it). I wish we'd gotten access to Wright's 22 million lines of chatgpt traffic since September, that might have been particularly interesting! -- the abuse of LLM's in the case is itself something of public interest that sadly wasn't adequately ventilated in the trial because we weren't able to get the relevant records. But there were pretty good indications that Wright used ChatGPT directly to create forgeries, aid in the construction of other forgeries, and to pad out his witness statements in a bit of a volumetric attack. The Bitcoin legal defense fund has tried to get out most of what it could lawfully put out, -- skipping a few things with privacy issues-- but once the trial started the priority shifted to managing the case. The default openness of the US courts may well have been the real hero in all this: documents and statements made public in the kleiman case boxed wright in from every angle. Its important that materials from this case are made public because it may not, unfortunately, be the last we hear from wright. Even where the US case didn't make some things public, it make their existence public which in some cases enabled us to obtain them: e.g. we were able to get all of Gavin's communications with Satoshi which had previously been provided to Wright and whose existence Wright tried desperately and ultimately unsuccessfully to deny. The UK court openness is less by default, but the parties have a substantial ability to publish things-- allowing the parties to get things much closer to US practices.

esafak 3y ago

A more serious case of this took place in Turkey two decades ago, and involved the jailing of a significant fraction of the military leadership. So it amounted to a judicial coup against the military. The son-in-law of one of the generals (Cetin Dogan) analyzed a piece of the evidence, a Word document ostensibly dated 2003, and proved that it contained anachronisms dating it to at least 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledgehammer_(alleged_coup_plan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledgehammer_(alleged_coup_pla...

Dwedit 3y ago
Turkish Rathergate?
nuclearnice1 3y ago
Interesting. I did not know about this case. We had a similar thing in Pakistan. In fact, same font. https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/pakistan/how-calibri-font-brought-down-the-nawaz-sharif-government-1.2065614 https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/pakistan/how-calibri-font-br...
hilbert42 3y ago
You'd think by now that everyone—especially those who'd intend forging documents—would be aware of the 'mismatched' font problem but it appears not because it's happened in significant numbers of high profile cases in the past. Simply, these forgers haven't done their necessary homework. Even with homework done I'd never attempt it for the same reasons that Matthew Garrett outlined in his article. However, assume a hypothetical case where I had to forge a document what would I do? My first thought would be to obtain a pensioned-off PC complete with operating system, user apps such as MS Office/Word and standard default fonts that was last used a little before the date of my intended forgery. Obtaining such a PC may seem like a tall order but it might not be as difficult as it seems, but it certainly won't be easy. I say that it's possible by just looking at my own situation. In my shed I have a stack of old PCs gathering dust that haven't been switched on in several decades, no doubt there are many similar piles of junk out there in user-land that can be tapped for a suitable PC. Next, I'd ensure the PC was not switched on until I'd removed the hard disk and forensically mirrored it to a backup on another PC. The mirrored disk image can then be examined to determine the exact date when it was last used, etc., etc. Without reinstalling the hard disk and before switching it on I'd disconnect the PC's clock battery and or short out the clock operation so the clock was set to the factory default time (I.e. not set). I'd then switch on and set the date in the BIOS slightly ahead of the last date the PC was last switched on (that date I'll have already determined from my forensic analysis of the mirrored image). After reinstalling the HD I'd switch on and hopefully I'd have functional PC whose date and time would indicate that it was switched on shortly after the actual time it was last used. At this point and before proceeding further I'd take another mirror image of the HD and compare it with the original for any gotchas. Unless something goes awry I'll use this second mirror for all future installations and any necessary tweaks. My next step would be to draft out the forged text by hand on paper. I'd study this text with great care to ensure that I've the precise wording and that there are no references to forward dates or events that could not have happened by the date of the forgery. I'll then sit on the text for 24 hours or more to think about it just to make sure that everything I've written is as 'faultless' as is possible. Assuming all's well and only then will I switch on the PC and use the installed copy of MSO/Word with one of the common already-installed typefaces such as Ariel or Times New Roman to type my text. Even then, with all that done, I'd still be shitting myself that I'd not fully covered my tracks! Note: that's the short version, there are many other intermediate checks too detailed to mention here. Some of these steps may require minor tweaks to the second mirror (metadata changes, etc.) before it's mirrored back to the original HD. Any edits to the second mirror should only be done after it's been backed up. Doing these checks and ensuring that one's covered one's tracks isn't for the feinthearted. Right, the stakes have to be extraordinarily high to even bother attempting such a job. _ Edit: if the forgery is to appear in printed form then it should be printed on old stock paper with a printer of the same era, say a HP LaserJet III for instance. Even with expertise, artificially aging such a document is a complicated process and even then it's unlikely to pass muster with a basic forensic analysis. Another approach is to do the above then photocopy the original then 'lose' it and only use the copy. Recopying the copy on multiple machines of different brands will make tracing the original photocopier more difficult as each machine will have optics with minor distortions that are different to one another. Faxing the document sans headers will further obfuscate where the copy originated as faxes are of low resolution and introduce artifacts noise, but keep in mind that the mechanics and optics of fax machines introduce the same type of distortions as photocopiers. Again, don't bet your chances, if you use these methods then smart forensics are still likely to nab you.

mcdonje 3y ago

Interesting article, but the headline seems dubious. What's the opposite of survivorship bias? Because it seems like the population of good forgeries would be hard to quantify.

kelnos 3y ago
I don't think the premise that digital forgeries are hard is invalidated by the possibility that there might be a good number of undetected forgeries out there. Things can be hard to do, but still done in decent quantities. You do make a good general point, though! Good forgeries are by their nature not known to be forgeries.

userbinator 3y ago

They are only hard for those who get caught... ;-) The flip side of this is how difficult it is to avoid tracking and hidden metadata.

qweqwe14 3y ago

Surprised that noone mentioned Barely Sociable video on Satoshi Nakamoto[1] (last of a 3-part series). Pretty strong arguments as to why Adam Back is Satoshi, the amount of coincidences is just way too many IMO. Craig Wright is definitely not Satoshi, the guy has some issues and so keeps claiming that he is. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

It was amusing that this story and the key fob story were on the front page at the same time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39701931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39701931