Encrypted morally grey

[Andrew Schreiber]

Never said it was impossible just said to try it.

Originally Posted by Karibou

Challenge accepted: "According to you, I don't know how to do this," and "My brain hurts now."


And now, back to your regularly scheduled topic of discussion...

Originally Posted by Duke461

This is an unusual paragraph. I'm curious how quickly you can find out what is so unusual about it. It looks so plain you would think nothing was wrong with it. In fact, nothing is wrong with it! It is unusual though. Study it, and think about it, but you still may not find anything odd. But if you work at it a bit, you might find out! Try to do so without any coaching! You probably won't, at first, find anything particularly odd or unusual or in any way dissimilar to any ordinary composition. That is not at all surprising, for it is no strain to accomplish in so short a paragraph a stunt similar to that which an author did throughout all of his book, without spoiling a good writing job, and it was no small book at that. By studying this paragraph assiduously, you will shortly, I trust, know what is its distinguishing oddity. Upon locating that "mark of distinction," you will probably doubt my story of this author and his book of similar unusuality throughout. It is commonly known among book-conscious folk and proof of it is still around. If you must know, this sort of writing is known as a lipogram, but don't look up that word in any dictionary until you find out what this is all about.



Also, this

[Duke461]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Never said it was impossible just said to try it.

I know, i just wanted to share how amazing Earnest Vincent Wright is

[davidthefat]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Surely, Don's playing on the fact that the most commonly used letter in the english language is 'e'. Go ahead, try to write a sentence or two (that make sense) without using 'e'.

Look, I suck at this... LOOK! No, I don't know what I am doing...

[davidthefat]

In all seriousness. The password is encrypted with MD5 encryption 50 times over and RC4 20 time over or something like that. I thought I had something going on, but it was a dead end.

The hashed passwords are all there in the PDF, and the knowledge of encrypting and decrypting are published by Adobe themselves. They literally give you step by step instructions (so that 3rd party developers can make PDF readers) The catch is that MD5 encryption cannot be reversed. The way they check if the password is correct is by encrypting the password inputted by the user and checking that against the hashed password in the PDF file.

[Sean Raia]

A discussion on if its possible to crack the manuals encryption in 4 days? Of course it is, but its not probable at all. Someone with a great amount of processing power behind them and a modified dictionary attack has a small chance of getting it IMO

Summary of my post: AES may be great but FIRSTs passwords arent exactly obscure from a technical standpoint.

[avanboekel]

My dad works at fermilab, and I had him brute force decrypt the game manual with one of their supercomputers. It took about 5 hours. It is '@just*wait%till#kickoff&!' with out the ' '.

[Ernst]

Originally Posted by avanboekel

My dad works at fermilab, and I had him brute force decrypt the game manual with one of their supercomputers. It took about 5 hours. It is '@just*wait%till#kickoff&!' with out the ' '.

Do you know how many people just checked that code?

At least one.


Anyways, back to the original question, of whether FIRST said or even implied that it was in any way ok to crack, or even try to crack, the encrypted game manual, I think I may have an answer. The purpose of the encrypted game manual is so that their servers don't get overwhelmed immediately after/during KickOff. The purpose is not to challenge us to see who has the best computer, or access to the best computer. They don't want us to crack it.

Tl;dr: It's not a moral gray area. It's not ok.

[avanboekel]

Originally Posted by ZehP

The purpose of the encrypted game manual is so that their servers don't get overwhelmed immediately after/during KickOff. The purpose is not to challenge us to see who has the best computer, or access to the best computer. They don't want us to crack it.

Tl;dr: It's not a moral gray area. It's not ok.

Exactly- great point.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Sean Raia

Summary of my post: AES may be great but FIRSTs passwords arent exactly obscure from a technical standpoint.

Absolutely they are. There is a ton of entropy in the passwords we have been seeing in the past several seasons.

Last year: 5Time4for3robots2to1dance!

That is an EXTREMELY secure password by just about any measure. See: http://xkcd.com/936/

[JesseK]

Any public successful attempts to crack this year's encryption will simply make life more of a p.i.t.a. next year for us. Please don't do it. The school's computers are god-awful slow and would probably go up in flames if they had to decrypt 80 pages of 256-bit AES.

Besides, I doubt cracking it a day before kickoff would win anyone a championship.

To end this discussion: It's not grey, it's black and white. The same protection used by NASA is used here, so it would be like hacking into NASA. It's not right, and would give you an unfair advantage over the other teams. It goes against the rules of gracious professionalism and the values of FIRST, and therefore should not be done.

[Taylor]

There has been some discussion on this thread about the discussion on the thread being against forum rules (threadception?). Yes, the topic being discussed is of an unethical nature, but to be clear, nothing was said about the actual act itself (i.e. hey, if you wanna crack the password, here's how to do it); simply a discussion of the ethical consequences. My interpretation of the OP is suggesting a discussion of cracking the code just to see if it can be done, not to gain a competitive advantage or even read the contents of the manual. No moderators have felt the need to jump in; this to me is a great example of the beauty of Chief Delphi. We can discuss ethical implications of many issues in an academic way, be free with our thoughts, without fear of repercussions.
Hooray for Chief Delphi.

[LMD3130]

This needs to stop coming up on ChiefDelphi this is a very taboo subject, FIRST focuses on gracious professionalism and it's not that gracious to other teams to cheat towards and early start nor is it a professional move to give your self such an advantage that others do not have.

[Karibou]

Originally Posted by LMD3130

This needs to stop coming up on ChiefDelphi this is a very taboo subject, FIRST focuses on gracious professionalism and it's not that gracious to other teams to cheat towards and early start nor is it a professional move to give your self such an advantage that others do not have.

I don't think that any of us disagree with you when you say that trying to crack the manual before kickoff is not in the spirit of Gracious Professionalism. I do wish that the subject had never been breached at all for that reason, but now that it's happened, I'm glad to see the positive discussion that has stemmed from it (about why it is impossible to crack the code in a timeframe that would benefit the hacker).

[theprgramerdude]

Honestly, I'll give $100 to anyone that can decrypt it before kickoff.

Has anyone ever heard of software security engineering? Like someone said, a day or two (If at all, ha, the odds of cracking it are so low) head start might be not be "graciously professional", but is everyone forgetting the reason why it'd be done in the first place? Hint: it's not to get a peak at the game manual.

Writing a program that attempts to crack the super-secure FIRST password is a great way to get a start in the field of making information secure, and learning how information may not be; learning for the sake of learning is a far better thing than treating knowledge as taboo because it might be 'controversial'.

Note: I'm aware that cracking the password simply because one wants to see the manual ahead of the broadcast is unethical because it's an unfair advantage in the competition, and that's not what I'm advocating.