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The hidden world in short-wave.
I was interviewed a few weeks back for my website priyom.org [Javascript recommended] which is a community that tracks and logs Numbers Station and military radio stations from all over the world.
The article on The Daily Beast can be found here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/06/the-stupidly-simple-spy-messages-no-computer-could-decode.html
When I was 10 years old, I found a shortwave radio in a crumbling old leather trunk where we kept family photos and other memorabilia. As I spun the dial, tinny, modulating noises, like the song of an electronic slide whistle, emanated from the radio's small speaker. Staticky cracks and pops competed for airtime. The sounds swished and swirled, unintelligible and unremarkable. But then, emerging through the clamor, was a voice.
I might have run right over it with the dial, but the voice's rhythmic, steady pacing caught me up short. It wasn't a deejay. Nor a commercial. And he wasn't singing. He was just speaking. The same line, over and over again.
"7...6...7...4...3." Pause. "7...6...7...4...3."
I don't remember if those were the exact numbers. But they were numbers. A repeated sequence which had no obvious meaning, and was entirely devoid of context. To find him here, amidst the screeches and howls of the shortwave frequencies, was like coming upon a man standing in the middle of a forest, talking out loud to no one.
How long had he been here? Who was he talking to? He had that officious tone of the recorded telephone operators who chastised you for dialing a wrong number. "Please hang up, check the number, and dial again." And the same distracting static I'd heard in those messages filled the background. I wasn't sure if he was speaking live, or if he'd been recorded and set loose to play into the air.
It's well-written and a good introduction into the world of number stations and short-wave. I think the Soylent community will enjoy the article, maybe prompt some of you to dig a radio out of your attic and have a listen. Alternatively, you can listen to some stations online. Different stations broadcast at different times; check out the listings on the station schedule page (Javascript required).
Some other resources to check out on the scene:
Enigma 2000 group http://www.brogers.dsl.pipex.com/enigma2000
Simon Mason's website http://www.simonmason.karoo.net/
[Ed. addition.] These stations apparently depend on previously-distributed one-time pads:
In cryptography, the one-time pad is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked if used correctly. In this technique, a plaintext is paired with a random secret key. Then, each bit or character of the plaintext is encrypted by combining it with the corresponding bit or character from the pad using modular addition.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday April 29 2016, @02:39AM
For certain OTP en/decryption algos, it's easy to see that applying the specific and appropriate sequence of OTP on the very same cypher text would result in, say, the entire Shakespeare work being "decrypted".
(e.g. for XOR OTP encryption, the pad and the cypher text are interchangeable. Therefore you can construct your "appropriate sequence of OPT" by encrypting chunking Shakespeare work and encrypting it with your target sole cypher text).
I wonder if there are OTP algos for which there exists a given pair of plain/cypher text so that t is NOT possible to derive a OTP that maps one to the other.
If there are no such algos, it would mean that starting from a single cypher text and applying all possible QTP-es, one should be able to derive any and all the books that were, are and will ever be created.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday April 29 2016, @03:00AM
As long as the plain/cypher is the same size (which it must be) that would seem to be impossible. You wish to construct a plaintext that cannot be calculated from a ciphertext with *any* OTP key correct? If so, I believe that to be impossible, since there are no restrictions on the OTP key. Meaning, that through modular addition all you need to do is "choose" the difference between the plaintext and the ciphertext to obtain OTP. Nothing can be done mathematically to stop that, or preclude the selection of any one number over another.
It's 1:1, or bit to bit, so the OTP bit is literally just a mathematical operation performed on the other two bits. How can you stop that?
Therein lies the strength of OTP. Any ciphertext can generate all books, documents, images, and other datasets that could ever be created, that were also the same size, or less than the ciphertext. Which interestingly enough, also includes all traditionally encrypted representations as well as anything compressed. If less, nothing says you can't encrypt whitespace......
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday April 29 2016, @03:23AM
Correct, but I have a feeling that it isn't impossible.
Suppose an encryption scheme which will map the clear text alphabet over always-odd codes. If I'm presenting a cypher text containing all-even codes, you won't be able to decipher it
With the note that, if you allow concatenation of multiple decryption steps and repetitions in the OTP sequence, the same size or less restriction becomes superfluous (the problem degenerates into a "One-Time-Stream encryption")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 29 2016, @10:19AM
I wonder if there are OTP algos for which there exists a given pair of plain/cypher text so that t is NOT possible to derive a OTP that maps one to the other.
Sure, but why would you want to break (as in make not work) OTP that way? The charm of a proper OTP algorithm is that it can be anything of that length.
If there are no such algos, it would mean that starting from a single cypher text and applying all possible QTP-es, one should be able to derive any and all the books that were, are and will ever be created.
Which for a proper OTP system should be the case. The catch here is that you can't have that many OTP in our universe. There are some strong information limits to what we can have lying around.