Full encrypted manual?
 

Any word on when the encrypted manual will be out? I know it is usually put out before kick Off so that it can be downloaded before hand.

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

Most likely it won't come out till next week. My prediction is 1/6/16. The type of encryption they use can be cracked within a few days on average so they only release it a few days before kickoff. Most people would not even attempt to crack it but for the select few that would FIRST has to wait till a few days before so the surprise is not ruined for the masses.

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

LOL. The type of encryption they use would take 100 years for a brute force attack on average.

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

Who said anything about brute force. The password word clearly contains words relating to medieval times, conquering, capturing, etc. Typically all words in the password are English with a few substitutions of symbols and numbers. If you developed a list of common words in this genre/theme and used previous password examples it would not take 100 years. Another thing to consider is it would not just be one person trying this approach it would be groups of individuals with multiple computers attempting this. Kids who like hacking would work together to attempt this, which would also decrease the time needed. I think you are overly underestimating the CD crowd. Or overestimating the creativity of the game designers who made the password. Would they need to get lucky? YES! but will it take 100 years? NO! Does FIRST want to chance it by giving us the encrypted manual earlier than a few days? NO!

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

The type of encryption used is used by the US Government to keep Top Secret information secure for several weeks at a time.

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

You're trivilizing this by oversimplification. Can you come up with a set of rules that would solve the following passwords, assuming you knew the theme of the game? Note that only half of them have to do with the theme.

2015: R3C3CL3RU$H2015
2014: 3Zones2Goals1Alliance!
2013: sAucersFlyRobotsClimb!
2012: !HotShots!KnowBalance!
2011: 5Time4For3Robots2to1Dance!
2010: Breakaway4FRC!
2009: 1GiantLeap4FRC
2008: Drive!Straight?turn!LEFT!?
2007: 7sBg8H4x2f3R9C3tm5
2006: S1x240JrTBmsqf95DL06FdsTM33H
2005: 3XTr1pl3play2oo5
2004: FEma2X5E10vEir

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

Except for all of our personal information... yes I'm still bitter about the OPM hack.


Mostly this, you're almost better off brute forcing than trying to come up with a dictionary that would ever contain these words in these forms.

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

It would probably take most of the time between the release of the encrypted manuals and the start of the Kickoff presentations to get the people you want to work on this to agree what the rules for developing the "list of common words in this genre/theme" should be.

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

The only problem is that you are assuming they will use the same type of key this year as they have in the past. Since the game name is already known I would expect FIRST to steer clear of words having to do with the theme. This is the first time we have been given the name before Kickoff.

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

Brute force is really as much about the computing power as it is the clever use of it. Thanks to Amazon AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure and RackSpace there's plenty of brute force to access if you can pay for it.

Using the averages is fine when you have an huge set of things to break and in this case you have basically 1. So you must consider the outlying minimum.

Then there's the issue that you don't know how well the encrypting software salted or what quality the source of randomness was it used.

All in all I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was well within the ability of a nationstate to crack that between now and kickoff.

Not sure how badly you want to know this game you'd go through all that trouble.
I can think of about 20 ways off hand that would be far easier to find out the field design or the whole game a lot easier.
No - I won't elaborate because saying not to give yourself an unfair advantage is all that needs to be said.

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

If you decide you don't want to be GP and want more time to work on your robot, it's a lot easier to not bag your robot and fake the lock-up form. Same effect, a lot less work.

But I'm confident no FIRST teams would do that.

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

You can legally build a practice robot - just don't bring it near the competition assembled.

A large percentage of the ChiefDelphi readers belong to teams that do just this based on my recent poll this year (including myself).

There are some limits obviously - you can only legally and practically change so much at the competition but it does give you some advantage. It can also bootstrap changing things between competitions.

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

Intentionally, you mean. There have been several that did something like that accidentally, not realizing it was against the rules. The fun part is when you put the bag on in the parking lot... in full view of the inspectors watching for teams to come in... Not sure exactly what happened with that one, but I believe the LRI was called over.

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

I'm sure it's a case of them wanting to be able to update the manual as late as possible before releasing it.

Re: Full encrypted manual?
 

Wow. _::rtm:: ^::rtm:: ::rtm:: ^::rtm:: _::rtm::Hopefully, anybody reading this thread is at least checking the basics.