- It's the applications, stupid
- Will a whitelist save personal computing?
- Thousands of Web sites under attack
- To solve the unsolvable problem
- Re-thinking the security of virtual machines
- Security Development Lifecycle trumps code complexity
- Is your Web site FIPS compliant?
- Computer security: Why have least privilege?
- Strategic security: Get a handle on authentication
- Control user installs of software
April 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Italian mob boss done in by Caesar Cipher
Some Italian mob bosses apparently don't know good encryption.
Passed on to me by my good friend Eric Heitzman:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060417/mafiaboss_tec.html?source=rss
My favorite quote from the article has this background context:
"each number corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. "A" is 4, "B" is 5, "C" is 6 and so on until the letter Z , which corresponds to number 24,"
And here is the "mathematics expert" they interviewed:
"According to Martignago, the Provenzano code might have been made more secure by changing the + 3 key with other shift characters ( +5, +7, +8, etc.) from time to time."
This is one of those stories that make you laugh out loud if you're a crypto geek. My wife is just shaking her head at me.
Posted by Roger Grimes on April 18, 2006 04:51 PM
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re your favourite quote, surely I'm not the first to point out that the Italian alphabet has only 21 letters?
re the second quote, I suppose Martignago meant "from time to time" within the same cypher text, which would make decrypting marginally less easy?
just my 2 lira...
cheers,
jk
jk,
From the article:
"While the classic Caesar cipher moves everything three letters later (A becomes D, B becomes E, etc.), the "Provenzano code" assigns a number to each letter by simply increasing by 3 the value given to the 21 letters of the Italian alphabet listed in order."
Hence Z = 24 instead of 29.
dk
Posted by: Dan Knight at April 25, 2006 10:39 AM
