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For 15 years, a sculpture known as Kryptos has stood in a courtyard inside the heavily guarded Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Its coded message, made up of thousands of letters on a copper scroll, has stumped code breakers for 15 years. And although it's been seven years since anyone has made any progress cracking it, there's been an explosion of renewed interest in Kryptos since writer Dan Brown hid references to it on the jacket of The Da Vinci Code -- one of the hottest books in North America. And that has made life interesting for Kryptos'...

It is one of the world's most baffling puzzles, the bane of professional cryptologists and amateur sleuths who have spent 15 years trying to solve it. But the race to find the secrets of Kryptos, a sculpture inside a courtyard at the CIA's heavily guarded headquarters in Langley, Virginia, may be reaching a climax. And interest has soared since Dan Brown hid references to Kryptos on the cover design for his bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, and suggested it might play a role in his next novel, The Solomon Key. The Kryptos sculpture incorporates a coded message made up...

February 15, 2005 SHA-1 Broken SHA-1 has been broken. Not a reduced-round version. Not a simplified version. The real thing. The research team of Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu (mostly from Shandong University in China) have been quietly circulating a paper describing their results: collisions in the the full SHA-1 in 2**69 hash operations, much less than the brute-force attack of 2**80 operations based on the hash length. collisions in SHA-0 in 2**39 operations. collisions in 58-round SHA-1 in 2**33 operations. This attack builds on previous attacks on SHA-0 and SHA-1, and is a major, major cryptanalytic...

The Bush administration is considering making the National Security Agency _ famous for eavesdropping and code breaking _ its "traffic cop" for ambitious plans to share homeland security information across government computer networks, a senior NSA official says. Such a decision would expand NSA's responsibility to help defend the complex network of data pipelines carrying warnings and other sensitive information. It would also require significantly more money for the ultra-secret spy agency. The NSA's director for information assurance, Daniel G. Wolf, was expected to outline his agency's potential role during a speech Wednesday at the RSA technology conference in...

Twisting The Light Away New Scientist vol 182 issue 2451 12 June 2004, page 36 A novel trick with light has got physicists in a spin. Pitch your photon like a corkscrewing curveball and you can push bandwidth through the roof, flummox eavesdroppers and perhaps even talk to aliens. Stephen Battersby investigates IT DOESN'T look like much, just a plain box about half a metre long. Nonetheless, this is the prototype of something with seemingly magical properties. Fire a beam of its laser light at the dust sitting on your tabletop and the dust motes will begin to dance around...

  Tracking Terror In Tangled WebLONDON, Aug. 17, 2004  (Photo: CBS/AP) Using proxy servers continents away, terrorists can graft their sites anywhere. Accused terrorist Abu Hamza al Masri was caught in an Internet sting.  (Photo: CBS) (CBS) If the pen is mightier than the sword, the keyboard has become the new weapon in the war of terror, promoting it and fighting it. As CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips reports, sometimes, the intent is simply propaganda. Sometimes, deeper in the net, hidden within other sites, is something more sinister: sites advocating violence, perhaps even providing instructions and commands. One site, which...

An Irish graduate student has uncovered words blacked-out of declassified US military documents using nothing more than a dictionary and text analysis software.Claire Whelan, a computer science student at Dublin City University was given the problems by her PhD supervisor as a diversion. David Naccache, a cryptographer with Gemplus, challenged her to discover the words missing from two documents: one was a memo to George Bush, and another concerned military modifications to civilian helicopters.The process is quite straightforward, and according to Naccache, Whelan's success proves that merely blotting words out of declassified documents will not keep the contents secret.The first...

The National Interest Issue Date: Winter 2003/04, Posted On: 12/12/2003 Networking Nation-States James C. Bennett The early 20th century was filled with predictions that the airplane, the automobile or the assembly line had made parliamentary democracy, market economies, jury trials and bills of rights irrelevant, obsolete and harmful. Today's scientific-technological revolutions (epitomized by space shuttles and the Internet) make the technologies of the early 20th century-its fabric-winged biplanes, Tin Lizzies and "Modern Times" gearwheel factories-look like quaint relics. Yet all of the "obsolete" institutions derided by the modernists of that day thrive and strengthen. The true surprise of the scientific revolutions ahead is...

The Evolution of a Cryptographer - CSO Magazine - September 2003 Bruce Schneier has more opinions than CSO has space to print them. To read his thoughts on cyberterrorism, national ID cards and secrecy, go to Print Links. Bruce Schneier, who literally wrote the book on cryptography, talks with Senior Editor Scott Berinato about his holistic view of security, both physical and technical. For a while, it seemed as if Bruce Schneier himself was encrypted. No one could decipher his whereabouts for an interview with CSO. This was unusual because Schneier, founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, is usually...

Quantum cryptography—hailed by theoreticians as the ultimate of uncrackable codes—is finally going commercial IN THE 1992 film “Sneakers”, the ostensible research topic of one of the main characters was something called “setec astronomy”. This was an anagram of the words “too many secrets”. The research was supposed to be about developing a method for decoding all existing encryption codes. Well, if that were ever the case, it certainly isn't any more—thanks to a start-up in Somerville, Massachusetts, called MagiQ. MagiQ is in the final stages of testing a system for quantum cryptography, which it plans to release commercially within the...

'Super-DMCA' fears suppress security research By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus Posted: 14/04/2003 at 10:16 GMT Steganography and honeypot expert Niels Provos may risk four years in prison by completing his Ph.D., writes Kevin Poulsen, of SecurityFocus. A University of Michigan graduate student noted for his research into steganography and honeypots -- techniques for concealing messages and detecting hackers, respectively -- says he's been forced to move his research papers and software offshore and prohibit U.S. residents from accessing it, in response to a controversial new state law that makes it a felony to possess software capable of concealing the existence or...

The Atlantic Monthly | September 2002   Homeland Insecurity A top expert says America's approach to protecting itself will only make matters worse. Forget "foolproof" technology; we need systems designed to fail smartly  by Charles C. Mann   .....   To stop the rampant theft of expensive cars, manufacturers in the 1990s began to make ignitions very difficult to hot-wire. This reduced the likelihood that cars would be stolen from parking lots; but apparently contributed to the sudden appearance of a new and more dangerous crime, carjacking.  After a vote against management Vivendi Universal announced earlier this year that its...

Here's a fun cryptogram site for the best and brightest Freepers.