Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

To tell you that you won't be able to crack it.

Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

I agree with what's been posted so far:

Should we crack the manual? No. It's not fair to FIRST and everyone else who is following the rules.

Could we crack the manual, as the thread title asks? Yes, of course we could, given enough time. I'd actually be curious to see how long it takes to do so, so long as it happens after kickoff.

EDIT: Also, given the OP's anonymous account, they know the answer to both. I'm not sure that this thread serves a purpose any more - would it be possible to close it?

Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

+1

Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

Found this on "http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1279619"
......

Faster supercomputer (as per Wikipedia): 10.51 Pentaflops = 10.51 x 1015 Flops [Flops = Floating point operations per second]

No. of Flops required per combination check: 1000 (very optimistic but just assume for now)

No. of combination checks per second = (10.51 x 1015) / 1000 = 10.51 x 1012

No. of seconds in one Year = 365 x 24 x 60 x 60 = 31536000

No. of Years to crack AES with 128-bit Key = (3.4 x 1038) / [(10.51 x 1012) x 31536000]
= (0.323 x 1026)/31536000
= 1.02 x 1018
= 1 billion billion years


In conclusion it is possible!

Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

Perhaps so participants in other countries know they have the right tools to unencrypt the file. This is also likely the reason that FIRST isn't using a stronger form of encryption in the first place. Not as an invention to crack it.

Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

So, I saw this thread and let out a groan like everyone else, but then my curiosity sort of ran with this.

It's not very difficult to write a piece of software that would not only crack the code (brute force), but it's just a skip and a hop beyond that to parallelize the code to easily run on multiple PCs (say student laptops).

From an implementation standpoint, my mind was racing. I know exactly what the program would look like, how it would communicate, etc. But what about the feasibility with respect to time?

Searching through all possible combinations is no, just no. However, let's take that there will be 20 characters, and each character can have roughly 30 possible combinations (letters or punctuation).

Let's lay out the givens/assumptions:
20^30 combinations (constraint),
50 household computers (assumption),
4 Ghz (4 E 9 Hz) processors (assumption).

How long?

Well, some simple-ish math, it would take 1.702 E 20 years for all 50 PCs to simply flip through every single combination. That doesn't even include computation time to try the password, check to see if it's been decrypted, network traffic, etc.

I thought about possible optimizations based on dictionaries, but there are commonplace, accepted misspellings that wouldn't show up in a dictionary (e.g. hax or rox).

Ethics and morals and all that aside, just doing that calculation and coming to that realization was kind of...cool...and a little humbling.

My budding curiousity noped out of that line of thought and went off to do the fantasy draft for the night.

- Sunny G.

Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

It's more likely simply that AES is the default encryption you get when you encrypt a PDF with a password. It used to be DES 40/56 but that's so easy to crack with modern equipment that I don't think it's even an option these days.

Given the passwords from the past few years, there's enough entropy that a heuristic dictionary attack would be unlikely to provide a result in a 3 day timeframe. Similarly, it wouldn't be possible to scan a 128 bit keyspace without some serious distributed processing power.

So this whole discussion is an academic exercise at best.

(I am not a crypto-nerd, but I can spend an hour explaining Diffie-Hellman.)

Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

So, assuming there can be ~3.8e+38 possible password combinations, we can rule out any simple GPU or Processor bruteforcing.

However, using rainbowtables in conjunction with an ASIC (generally used for decrypting hashes to mine "bitcoins") that I have, able to mine at 8ghash/second (8 billion hash guesses/sec) I have determined that it would take approximately 1.5103531e+18 years to crack.

So no, it's not happening.

Even if someone had cloud hashing, with a whopping 100th/s (meaning 100,000,000,000,000 guesses/sec) it would still take 1.2082825e+17 years.

Again, not happening. Unless someone randomly guessed it, which would be completely absurd. We waited all night for Santa to come on Christmas, so we can wait 34 more hours.

Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

I feel like this conversation was just a way to pass that time you mention. It is a lot closer to kickoff now than when this conversation started.

Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

Every day at 6am they send the weather report, so you should be able to bias your algorithm to find those words.

Wait, wrong code.

Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

I vote for a Jurassic Park style "Ah Ah Ah" video of Frank when someone actually tries to crack it....

Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

You only need to know the name of one man in Manchester to beat all of FRC!

Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

David Beckham? I think you are five years too late.

Sorry, wrong Manchester.

Re: Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?
 

Hey, this isn't the enigma code! Besides... They included something else besides just the weather in those reports that really gave them away and made the whole thing useless.