Encrypted Game Manual - Could we crack it?

[yersinia]

http://security.stackexchange.com/qu...ion-set-to-bru

[JamieKilburn]

Originally Posted by yersinia

Is attempting to crack the encryption on the game manual pdf that different from trying to figure out the hint?

I think the biggest difference is that with the game hint, you have no idea if your guess was spot on, or completely off the mark. You can guess and guess and try and discuss it with your friends, but it won't provide you with any advantage before kickoff, and you'll never know if your approach was right. On the other hand, if you obtain a game manual before kickoff, you know everything about the game before anyone else. Kickoff will mean basically nothing to you. Trying to decipher the game hint is (in my opinion)pretty fun. But it really doesn't help you out come build season. If you had the full manual pre-kickoff, that could be a different story. Getting the manual pre-kickoff is like opening all your Christmas gifts a week before Christmas morning. What's the fun in that?

[magnets]

I don't like this thread. It's silly, as you won't be able to crack the manual password, but makes us look like a bunch of goons because we're trying to crack it.

Kickoff is Saturday. We should take these last few days to relax, see our family, and get ahead with our work. I am sure that there will be plenty of technical challenges to deal with this year.

EDIT: 666th post!

[orangemoore]

It's a little sad to see that some people would try to crack the game manual before the release. I've always wanted to try after kickoff just to see how long it would take. That is more an experiment of the encryption.

[Jessica Boucher]

Especially in the light of the other thread - I'm all about non-serious discussion around cracking the manual, but let's keep it above the belt.

[Joe Ross]

The easiest one to do with rules is 2014. If you assume that a 10,000 word dictionary could find each of the 3 words (it would also have to contain capitalization variations) and 4 random characters (100 character search space), you have a search space of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 passwords.

Given the posted rate of 670 million keys per second and 10,000 people in FIRST all trying to crack in a perfectly distributed way, it would take about half a year to exhaust the search space.

In order to generalize it to the rules in the first post, it would take several orders of magnitude longer.

[kjohnson]

Poll voters should be reminded that the votes are not anonymous. We can see who voted Yes...

[nuggetsyl]

Well lets take an average processor speed, not too fancy, cracking approximately at 22,004k/s a PDF document. Assuming you are only bruting a-z0-9A-Z with out spaces, special characters, etc.

It would take approximately 1 septillion years. or 1.0306281275164522e+24 years 33 days 7 hours 30 minutes and 54 seconds

The amount of password combinations you would potentially have to test is (7.159713505559651e+35 password combinations)

Again I am assuming we are NOT using any GPU, Amazons AWS, etc. We are using an average processor. If you use GPU or AWS, this would SIGNIFICANTLY speed up your cracking. You can play with the numbers at this. http://calc.opensecurityresearch.com/

[nuggetsyl]

I clicked a poll question and can't change the answer. I had 0 intention of answering the question.

[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by nukemknight

Poll voters should be reminded that the votes are not anonymous. We can see who voted Yes...

Sounds ominous. I think its fair to remind everyone that basing an opinion on a person based on one button they clicked on the internet is kind of unreasonable. Okay its really unreasonable and nobody should feel guilty on here because they chose to express an opinion.

Originally Posted by nuggetsyl

I clicked a poll question and can't change the answer. I had 0 intention of answering the question.

Don't worry I did too...

[DonRotolo]

tl;dr.
The thread asks if we COULD crack it: My answer is no.
The poll asks of we would help crack it, my answer is the same.
And, SHOULD we crack it? Why waste the time? You can't.

[nickmcski]

Part of me wants to try to crack it just as a challenge, but I wouldn't do it now. If I were to it would be over the summer just as a fun challenge when everyone already knows the password.

[Michael Hill]

It really concerns me that even with this small sample, there are that many people who want to crack the manual. Come on...what happened to GP? It's just a game, guys. Even if you crack it (you can't), you'll only feel bad throughout the season when either A) you don't win, or B) you do win, but feel dirty about it because you had an advantage. In any case, you're not having fun, and that's a huge part of why we do this.

[kjohnson]

Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird

Sounds ominous. I think its fair to remind everyone that basing an opinion on a person based on one button they clicked on the internet is kind of unreasonable. Okay its really unreasonable and nobody should feel guilty on here because they chose to express an opinion.

It was meant to sound ominous. The poll asks if your team would do something blatantly against the core values of FIRST. Even if it is your opinion, it reflects on your team.

This wasn't aimed at any single person or team and I haven't made any assumptions based on the poll results. However, sometimes people (especially students) need a reminder that what they say in a public place is just that: public. Yes, the math behind the theoretical question of how long it would take to crack is interesting, but the OP was clearly (using a brand new, anonymous account) attempting to split the cracking efforts.

That being said, if I recognized that one of my team's students had answered yes, we'd be having a talk about why they think cracking the game manual is acceptable.

[mega900997]

Guess I should've read more carefully, I thought this was for cracking it after the password was released.