NSA Holiday greeting by political animator Mark Fiore — See Spying Claus make his rounds this holiday season. He sees you when you are sleeping, he knows what calls you make…

MICHAEL RIVERO’S FOURTH NSA CHALLENGE

I am going to hurl the defy once more at the NSA cryptographers. My goal here is to demonstrate that real criminals and real terrorists can evade the NSA’s cryptographers and that the whole point of their system of back-doors and mandated weak encryption is to keep an eye on you, the law-abiding citizen (and occasionally profit from the business secrets they purloin from your electronic devices).

This time I am going to do things a bit different.

As I stated below, decoding a message is a two-step process of first finding the method, then brute-forcing the key for a particular message. My Third NSA Challenge actually provided the key but not the method, and nobody succeeded in breaking the message.

This time, I have come up with a method that is intended to make a brute-force key attack very compute intensive.

In addition to the exclusive-or operation, the key is also used to scramble the message itself, and one must have a significant portion of the key before one can find anything of the clear message at all. So in THIS challenge, I am handing out the source code for both the encryption and decryption methods, along with the encrypted message. One need only find the key.

Now, because I am handing out the method at the start of the challenge, it may be that someone will break the key and decode the message (and the first to do so will win a WRH coffee mug). It will be interesting to see. The code may be breakable, but will cost far more time and resources than can be justified on someone who is not actually suspected of any real crime.

I call this the Ten Thousand Monkeys Code, because obviously the only way to brute force the key is to fire random strings into the system and hope something pops out. However, should some message appear, one cannot be certain that it is in fact the actual original message, or something arrived at totally by chance by the ten thousand monkeys pounding away on encryption keys.

Here is the RAR file with the source code, executables for Windows XP, and the encrypted message.

This source code is hereby placed in the public domain.

Read the whole series here at WRH