2011 Encrypted manuals are out. [Archive]

viperred396

05-01-2011, 15:49

Now lets say some one does break the 128bit encryption before kickoff... What happens?

If they read it they loose all respect that the FIRST community had for them but if they jsut do it for fun they get a nice pat on the back

AdamHeard

05-01-2011, 15:52

I meant more like are they disqualified or some other grave consequences.

There are no rules about it. I assume FIRST assumes that no one would attempt it, and that it's not possible to crack in time.

Andrew Schreiber

05-01-2011, 15:55

Now lets say some one does break the 128bit encryption before kickoff... What happens?

They get to have an additional 2-3 days of build season.

Probably not really useful.

Edit: Oh, and FIRST might stop putting these out early so some of us don't have to /. their servers.

Peter Matteson

05-01-2011, 15:58

Frankly I'm not that concerned about it. The team(s) that knew what the 2009 game object early didn't do any better because they had an extra few weeks knowing what they needed to manipulate.

Cyberphil

05-01-2011, 16:03

Well, just like anything in life, there will be those people that cheat the system, however unhelpful it is. The lengthened build season does not seem to be worth the loss of respect the FIRST community has for the team.

nighterfighter

05-01-2011, 16:21

Now lets say some one does break the 128bit encryption before kickoff... What happens?

They consume 30 gigawats of power! :D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force_attack#Theoretical_limits

Bryan Herbst

05-01-2011, 16:35

I believe that is part of the reason they wait until a few days before kickoff.
Lessens the likelihood of someone gathering the computing power to brute force it.

CrazyCarl461

05-01-2011, 16:36

They consume 30 gigawats of power! :DThat is if they take one year to do it. If they want to get it done before kickoff, they would need 4074 gigawats of power:ahh: (assuming they get started right away).

EDIT: In the US, that would be $24.4 Billion worth of electricity.

davidthefat

05-01-2011, 16:37

Psh, I give up after trying for an hour...

Alan Anderson

05-01-2011, 16:38

Now lets say some one does break the 128bit encryption before kickoff...

Let's not.

Seriously, talk about cracking a password should not be welcome in this community.

JohnBoucher

05-01-2011, 16:40

Let's not.

Seriously, talk about cracking a password should not be welcome in this community.

It is not allowed. It will get you banned.

Andrew Schreiber

05-01-2011, 16:56

Let's not.

Seriously, talk about cracking a password should not be welcome in this community.

Discussing doing it for malicious uses (such as gaining access to the game manual early) is not welcome. Discussions about the mathematics behind encryption is actually quite fascinating and I think should be encouraged. I would even go so far as to say that discussion of techniques for defeating encryption and why it is often not worth trying are incredibly useful.

Of course, if the mods disagree with this view please delete this post and let me know.

JesseK

05-01-2011, 17:03

The practicality of cracking the password is negligible. The passwords have historically been strong enough that unless someone uses a botnet there simply isn't enough time to crack it successfully before Saturday. 0-day hacks into Adobe as attempts to crack encrypted files have simply resulted in 0-day exploits for internet browsers instead of actually unencrypting the files, so I also doubt there are circumvention measures available.

In short: 128-bit SSL is still going strong, so don't get your hopes up of actually reading the contents before Saturday.

Andrew Schreiber

05-01-2011, 17:10

In short: 128-bit SSL is still going strong, so don't get your hopes up of actually reading the contents before Saturday.

Could you explain why? (Not saying you are wrong, just because I think it would make an interesting read)

Marc P.

05-01-2011, 17:14

They consume 30 gigawats of power! :D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force_attack#Theoretical_limits

If that were the case, you'd use roughly 12x less energy* time traveling into the future to find out the new game, and time traveling back.

*Assuming 1.21 gigawatts to travel through time one way, 2.42 gigawatts round trip.

SteveGPage

05-01-2011, 17:31

If that were the case, you'd use roughly 12x less energy* time traveling into the future to find out the new game, and time traveling back.

*Assuming 1.21 gigawatts to travel through time one way, 2.42 gigawatts round trip.

I have a flux capacitor if someone can get the 2.42 gigawatts, and a Delorian, too.

dag0620

05-01-2011, 17:35

I have a flux capacitor if someone can get the 2.42 gigawatts, and a Delorian, too.

The Questions is, do we attempt to build a Mr.Fusion, or do we go for the Plutonium from the Libyans?

EricH

05-01-2011, 17:36

The Questions is, do we attempt to build a Mr.Fusion, or do we go for the Plutonium from the Libyans?
Neither. We go for the lightning bolt.

GW Kalrod

05-01-2011, 17:50

Could you explain why? (Not saying you are wrong, just because I think it would make an interesting read)

128-bit encryption means 128 bits.

The number of permutations is 2^128, or 340282366920938000000000000000000000000 possible permutations.

Even with really fast processors, it would take months to brute force that. Assuming you don't really have access to some kind of supercomputer or massive distributed computing network.

Although a few recent papers have called into question the security. AES-128 encryption. If you like technical stuff, here:
http://eprint.iacr.org/2009/374.pdf

Although they conclude the encryption is fairly secure at this time, some flaws have started to appear.

pfreivald

05-01-2011, 18:26

It's something I've worried about since "DriveFastTurnLeft"... If the passwords were random strings of alphanumerics, then they'd be for all intents and purposes impossible to crack in the time frame -- but game hints combined with cribbed passwords, that's just bad cryptology right there!

Andy Grady

05-01-2011, 18:28

Andrew Schreiber

05-01-2011, 18:29

Here is a question regarding NOT cracking the code..

I am new to the Mac universe, I am trying to download and save the files to my computer and open them with adobe which i have just downloaded. Instead of being successful, it says that the files are damaged and I don't even get the prompt for the password. Anyone with a Mac have a tip or two?

Help would be appreciated.

Just use the default Preview.app instead of the Adobe one. I never had a problem in the past. You could also try redownloading as they may actually have been downloaded corrupt (it happens).

Andy Grady

05-01-2011, 19:03

Just use the default Preview.app instead of the Adobe one. I never had a problem in the past. You could also try redownloading as they may actually have been downloaded corrupt (it happens).

Got it! Thanks! Computer was being temperamental.

plnyyanks

05-01-2011, 19:04

Here is a question regarding NOT cracking the code..

I am new to the Mac universe, I am trying to download and save the files to my computer and open them with adobe which i have just downloaded. Instead of being successful, it says that the files are damaged and I don't even get the prompt for the password. Anyone with a Mac have a tip or two?

Help would be appreciated.

this happened to me (albeit on Windows), after downloading and renaming the file. I tried again, this time not renaming the PDF (keeping it as Complete_FRC_Game_Manual_05Jan2011.pdf) and it worked fine.

demosthenes2k8

05-01-2011, 20:03

Uhh...the passwords aren't usually just alpha. "Drive!Straight?turn.LEFT!?" is a good example. Punctuation adds a little more complexity

"Breakaway4FRC" was "simpler", but would still take a while to bruteforce.
I'm wondering if anyone's just run a bruteforcer during build season to see how long it would actually take...

Joe Schornak

05-01-2011, 20:15

On another note:

Does anyone else find it significant that the decryption test file features our favorite picture of our favorite singer? Perhaps FIRST is trying to tell us something more about that hint...

Or perhaps they're just messing with our minds.

BrendanB

05-01-2011, 20:31

I highly doubt it will happen as it is a mixture of words, caps, punctuation, etc. based on the ones they have given out in the past few years. My regard for that team/member would go down the tubes extremely fast and it is never worth it, especially this early in the season.

CrazyCarl461

05-01-2011, 22:41

Does anyone else find it significant that the decryption test file features our favorite picture of our favorite singer? Perhaps FIRST is trying to tell us something more about that hint...

Or perhaps they're just messing with our minds.It is fairly common for a game hint to appear in the decryption test. As for messing with our minds.. I've always thought that's been the whole point of the hints ;)

Mark Holschuh

05-01-2011, 23:17

My memory from past seasons was that we could download the encrypted file of the Competition Handbook prior to the Kickoff, and then open it with the password. This was done to avoid 1500+ teams from trying to download the file at the same time, and locking up the server.

When I click on the link to the file, I just get a request for the password, and am not able to download the file. Are others able to download the file?

Chris is me

05-01-2011, 23:19

You have to right click it and "save link as" to download.

Mark Holschuh

05-01-2011, 23:21

That worked. Thanks!

Grim Tuesday

05-01-2011, 23:25

If anyone was lucky enough, or had enough computing power to crack it, I hope that they would have the maturity not to read it.

The code is essentially 3.8*10^38 permutations, and the fastest single computer can perform 10^15 floating point operations per second (FLOPS). By comparison, a Core i7 is about 12 gigaflops.

Correct me if im wrong, but I believe that the math is [(3.8*10^38)/(10^15)]

Which ends up with 3.8 × 10^23 seconds. 1.2049721 × 10^16 years. Thats quite a long time. Unless, of course, someone gets lucky.

I feel like I did the math wrong, though. Someone kindly correct me.

Christopher149

07-01-2011, 16:41

You actually did do the math correctly, as long as each permutation requires one floating-point operation.

Trent B

08-01-2011, 00:49

This discussion came around one and a half years ago. For those of you not around.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=78124