Wired Magazine Calls for NSA Code Breaking Challenge

reply to post by Now_Then


Haha...well I think I have the answer to this one!!

www.channel4.com...

SOLVED:
"Disabling the last hope of freedom"

I wish there were more efforts in finding out the purpose of this agency instead of decoding that message that is for the eyes of the entire public to see...

Who really thinks they were created for defending the Pentagon or Nasa from the attacks of lonely underage hackers living in their basement is in for a treat. Or the dangers of the chinese or russian hackers known worldwide for their abilities

The breach in their networks so far were caused by the ignorance or the firms hired to put up their systems and their networks , firms that most likely are owned by important persons highly tied with an administration or an agency themselves.

The purpose is more like "put a socket in the mouth of the one speaking otherwise than what is our official story or otherwise than what it's being said on tv"

The targets of this agency are the common citizens that don't agree with one thing or another , the ones that stand up to the "megaphoners" without being paid and only because of their own beliefs.
And not just citizens of the US , but worldwide.

Just another step forward in controlling the internet with brute force , that's what it should be discussed regarding to the USCYBERCOM and not making efforts in decoding a visible fro everyone code...

I came across the below article today at The Register that is interesting about the code. It gives some more info if you wanna check it out.
It says "Provided that this is entered correctly into a hash generator, the Cyber Command seal string is produced."
The Register article

Stealth

Wow I must be way off then....

9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a

These.......st..s.......s......tt.........hs


Well I am no code cracker either.

[edit on 7/8/2010 by CaptGizmo]

[edit on 7/8/2010 by CaptGizmo]

[edit on 7/8/2010 by CaptGizmo]

Originally posted by stealthsurfer
According to a comment on a 4chan board, this is what he came up with...

The code on their website is 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a
Decimal is:
158 196 193 41 73 164 243 20 116 242 153 5 140 226 178 42
Poder Cybernetico
Dog Latin for "protect the internet"

Decryption key should be this:
"The missions of U.S. Strategic Command are to deter attacks on U.S. vital interests, to ensure U.S. freedom of action in space and cyberspace, to deliver integrated kinetic and non-kinetic effects to include nuclear and information operations in support of U.S. Joint Force Commander operations, to synchronize global missile defense plans and operations, to synchronize regional combating of weapons of mass destruction plans, to provide integrated surveillance and reconnaissance allocation recommendations to the SECDEF, and to advocate for capabilities as assigned"

I also come up with Poder Cybernetico which could mean "protect the internet", but not sure how he figures what the Decryption key should be.

poder cibernetico could mean cyber power ... not protection .... it can be interpret in different ways ... the word poder actual means power .... and cibernetico means cybernetic ...

Originally posted by killjoy27
ATS - Deny Ignorance - Don't feed the trolls - Wear clean underware.
is now_then's code

That it does!

Anyone wanting a reader for those 2D barcode's can get the one I used here and you can generate your own with this web app

a am quite sure it is a hexidecimal number [base 16]

all the alphabetic characters are 'a' through 'f'.

It could be a large prime number or a product of two prime numbers,
which would probably make it an RSA cryptologic key in all likelihood.

reply to post by slank


Nothing that slick. It's been cracked; and is just a MD5 sum:

$ /bin/echo -n "USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries." | openssl md5

Note to USCYBERCOM: a MD5 sum is a checksum, not a cryptographic encoding technique. You might should have used SHA.

Originally posted by Now_Then

Originally posted by stealthsurfer
9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a

Well it's a 32 character string, or hash - that's 256 bit's of information. (8 times 32 = 256).

It may not decode 'to' anything at all, it could just as easily be an encryption key, a bloody secure one too (apart from the fact it's there for all to see!)...

Should that be a key for something what system is it for? - To try and brute force a 256 bit key according to wiki

A device that could check a billion billion (10^18) AES keys per second would require about 3×10^51 years to exhaust the 256-bit key space.

That's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (ten quintillion) possible combinations PER SECOND constantly for.. wait for it lol 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. (edit, three sexdecillion years apparently! - can you say big numbers? lol)

Phew.. And not a single toilet break - (The universe is about 13,700,000,000 years old).

[edit on 7/7/2010 by Now_Then]

MD5 is 128-bit. The 32 characters returned are hexadecimal (0-9, a-f). Hex characters are composed of 4 bits which means (32*4) = 128. Of course, here in windows/web browser they may be represented as each being an 8-bit ASCII value or some other character encoding

MD5 is also a one-way encryption. It accepts any amount of data and generates a 32 digit hexadecimal signature, usually used for verifying file contents by a 'cheksum' or used to hash passwords. The original password data does not exist any longer 'in the hash', and can only be compared to the hash result by rehashing the original password and comparing the two hashes to see if they match. This is not completely secure as MD5 does not have very good collision avoidance (a collision is when different input result in the same output hash).

For an example on how the data is not retained after the hash is generated: the password "god" and a 50megabyte file will each have the same 128-bit hash.

So, in order to understand how whoever 'won' found out which string produced the hash was exactly this:

In the ''contest' they gave a hint:

“While there a few different proposals during the design phase, in the end the choice was obvious and something necessary for every military unit,” the source adds. “The mission.”

"The mission" led the person to look at the mission statement of the US CYBERCOMMAND. He then copied the mission statement into an MD5 encryption program, and checked to see if the hash it produced matched the hash on the seal.

The string later got added (hashed) to some rainbow tables on the web, so whenever anyone else put that hash in one of the free online rainbow tables, it would return the proper string that matched it.

reply to post by RestingInPieces

I can not seem to find a md5 conversion tool online to plug the number in other than using Java. Know any out there?

Originally posted by charlie_the_loafer
I wish there were more efforts in finding out the purpose of this agency instead of decoding that message that is for the eyes of the entire public to see...

The NSA has been thoroughly documented within James Bamford's series of books that discuss this agency.

Check them out at a local library.

Originally posted by CaptGizmo
reply to post by RestingInPieces

 

I can not seem to find a md5 conversion tool online to plug the number in other than using Java. Know any out there?

If you want to use MD5 to create a hash from any amount of data, then you can go here www.iwebtool.com...

If you want to do it "the other way around" then you can't do that. MD5 is one way.

You can, however, look for online rainbow tables (most cost $500-$1000) for A terabyte or more of hashes. There are some flaky free online "md5 decrypting" pages which compare the hash you enter to a prehashed string from the database to see if there is a match and return the original string.

These are only going to return password like string, not entire paragraphs of information.