Tim van der Molen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > http://www.bytereef.org/m4_project.html > > It looks quite interesting.
Thanks! > > Clearly the project is from the "Because we can" department. > > Is it realistic to hope that anywhere between 10-100 people > > would take part? > > I don't really know, but I would be surprised if you cannot find more > than ten people. Cool, that sounds encouraging. > > Does the intro page make clear what the whole thing is about? > > Although I haven't yet thoroughly read all the links on your site, I > think you could improve a few things. > > What do you mean with "a distributed attack"? An attempt to decrypt the > messages, I guess? Yes, I tried to find a short expression for what is going on. I've seen the term used in connection with cryptography (e.g. 'distributed attack against 56 bit cipher'). Does it sound too much like Denial of Service Attack? How about: | The M4 Project is an effort to break 3 original Enigma messages | with the help of distributed computing. The signals were intercepted | in the North Atlantic in 1942 and are believed to be unbroken. | Ralph Erskine has presented the intercepts in a <link>letter</link> to | the journal Cryptologia. > You could tell more about how it works. What exactly are the clients > doing? What will the server do with the collected information? I tried to explain it in the 'Method' section, but that is a little abstract. The general problem is, I thought it would be better to keep all information as brief as possible so as not to lose the reader's attention. Could be the wrong approach. I have to think a little about that section. > Personally, I would be very interested in the mathematical details. The key thing is the hill climbing algorithm. Generally hill climbing algorithms try to optimize an object, in this case the plugboard settings, by changing the object step by step. Then the "goodness" or fitness of the new object has to be determined by a scoring function. Changes that lead to a "better" object are retained. Here the changes lie in constantly trying out new wirings of the Enigma plugboard. After each change the scoring function tests a new wiring by deciphering the message and trying to determine how closely the resulting plaintext matches the statistics of the natural language. > Some background information about the Enigma messages would be nice, > too. Ok, that's another point where I have to think how much to leave out. The full information is in Erskine's letter if you follow the link. In that letter, you have to follow the link "Gillogly's response", where Enigma researcher Weierud gives some reassuring comments about the authenticity of the messages. It's a bit tricky to sum all that up. Possibly I'll leave it at the "intercepted in..." version above. > And perhaps you could explain the results of "break 5", mentioned on your > site. Something like: If you look at the result dated "2005-12-20 19:33:48", you will see a partial break of the <link>fifth challenge message</link>. The break is partial, because the correct middle ring setting still has to be adjusted. That is the reason why all the text after "betriebstof" is gibberish. But should this go on the intro page? > Are these intelligent suggestions? I have a very limited knowledge of > crypthography. Those are great suggestions. Difficult thing is to find a balance between what to include and what to leave out. > > The client is designed to run in the background, so the user > > doesn't get any status information. Is that a drawback? > > It's always nice to know what is going on. Would it be an idea to use > syslog? Yes, but as I just tested, I would need to modify the python script slightly; then the output could be piped to logger. Question: Does any current Unix system have logger, is it usually in the user's PATH (Solaris, anyone?), and is the user always allowed to use it? I've to check those things out. It would be nasty if the script chokes on that. > > Tim Thanks for the comments, Stefan -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
