anyone know when they release it. I heard it is released before kickoff and its encrypted? is this true? Like i dont want to believe the person who told me that because it seems kind stupid to give the game manual out to people. I know its encrypted but cant people like somehow get around that?
They usually release the sections that do not pertain to the game well ahead of time, non-encrypted. The rest are released, in encrypted form, a few days before kickoff. The encryption is, shall we say, secure, and I would hope that no one in FIRST makes any serious effort to get around it. Its to prevent the entire FIRST community from overloading FIRST’s servers in the minutes following kickoff.
The past couple of years we’ve gone to our regional kickoff, with the downloaded, encrypted manual on a couple laptops ready to be viewed as soon as they release the key. Hint: if you do this, bring a digital camera so you can snap a picture of the key on the webcast screen, then you can look at your camera and type in the key. Being able to read the manual on the 200 mile ride home is helpful for the first rolling brainstorming session.
While they do give the manual out a few days before the kickoff, it is strongly encrypted.
And as far as someone getting around it … Yes, it is possible that someone could hack it, however, consider the consequences for someone who did and got caught. Most likely they, and their team, would be barred from playing that year. Is that worth a day or 2 advantage? I don’t think so, personally.
a friendly reminder from the CD moderator crew: please refrain from any form of discussion of cracking the manual on these forums.
Why not watch the webcast and save yourself the 200 mile trip?
Ah, so there is a webcast of the regional?
My team has had the luxury of Motorola over the past few years, but this year we are moving to the school so we wanted to make sure that we could watch it somewhere else. But cool!!!.
We get to pick up the KOP too…and it’s a good excuse for a road trip! plus we get to visit our FIRST friends in Phoenix.
NASA webcasts and broadcasts the kickoff on NASATV. Details will be released in the near future I would imagine. The webcast is normally located at robotics.nasa.gov.
It’s not easily able to get around and if those who do get around it then it just spoils it for them. Trying to break the encryption is like trying to figure out dlavery’s game hints on a yearly basis lol.
Last year the encrypted sections were encrypted using AES. I don’t recall the strength used, but the minimum for AES is 128 bits.
The largest ever publicly known brute force attack was of an RC5-64 key. It took a distributed computing network 1,757 days to complete the attack. The 64 bit key cracked would take a maximum of 1.8410^19 operations to brute force. The 128 bit minimum key used in AES would take 3.410^38 operations. Assuming you had access to a distributed network the size of the one used for the RC5-64 crack it would take almost 10^20 years to complete the crack.
In addition there are only 3 publicly known breaks of AES (all sidechannel breaks based on specific implementations) allowing for decryption faster than brute-force. One requires physical access to the machine that performed the encryption. Another only works for encrypted ZIP archives create using WinZIP. The third is only valid for OpenSSL.
All three breaks are completely irrelevant here. I trust that if the encryption is good enough for goverment documents of SECRET (min. 128 bit AES) or TOP SECRET (min. 256 bit AES) levels than it is good enough for a few days of any high school students or team mentors that want to try to crack it.
What makes it even more difficult is that they use random characters, not a word. A very strong password, something like 20 or 25 characters.
I don;t know of any way to crack it aside from brute force. Assuming it was “only” 64 bits, you’d gain a -1754 (or so) day advantage as opposed to just watching the NASA webcast. In simple terms, you’d be all ready for the 2009 game in…2014 or so.:ahh:
Good luck with that.
While that’s usually been the case, 2008’s password was a phrase related to the game. I would imagine that, in some sense, that’s marginally less secure – if only because determining that phrase is contingent upon knowing the information that it’s protecting. 
As was 2005’s and (IIRC) 2007’s.
It gets worse for any would-be hackers, because there might or might not be words, characters, and numbers, in any combination of caps and lowercase.
Actually, FIRST released the 2008 password–minus characters–in hint #3, in a scrambled form, and nobody even figured out what the real words were, let alone what else was in there. Tells you something about how strong the encryption is.
Of course, it could be possible that the 2009 encryption key has already been released.
-dave
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Oh no, guys, look what you did…
Let the games begin…
Right on cue, Mr. Lavery, as always. applauds
H2Ohustle2CATCHbanana2oo9
Almost… Replace H2O with J3LL0 and you’ve got it.