1992 Sneakers connection to real cryptography

1992 Sneakers connection to real cryptography

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The 1993 movie Sneakers (currently free on Youtube) is one of my favorite movies. It has an amazing cast and one of the better soundtracks I’ve run across. It is one of the first great movies about hackers – and it’s largely very accurate for the 90’s era technology. Back when phone phreaking, cracking and copying games, pirate BBS boards, satellite TV hacking, building computer viruses, and breaking into early computer systems was all the rage.

One of the scenes in the movie involves a mathematician talking about large number theory in relation to cryptography. I took such a grad course on cryptography at Purdue back in the 90’s; and remember listening to his prattle about Artin maps, prime factorization, and a possible breakthrough of Gaussian proportions. Little did I know, however, his little diatribe and the slides were written by no other than Leonard Adleman – a 2002 Turing Award winner – as one of the creators of RSA encryption.

He recounts his interaction with Larry Lasker who approached him to consult on the movie and write the scene. Here Adleman shares his memories:

He told me that there would be a scene wherein a researcher would lecture on his mathematical work regarding a breakthrough in factoring – and hence in cryptography. Larry asked if I would prepare the slides and words for that scene. I liked Larry and his desire for verisimilitude, so I agreed. Larry offered money, but I countered with Robert Redford – I would do the scene if my wife Lori could meet Redford.

I worked hard on the scene. The “number field sieve,” (the fastest factoring algorithm currently known) is mentioned along with a fantasy about towers of number fields and Artin maps. I was tempted to name the new breakthrough the “function field sieve,” — since I was actually working on a paper at the time which would later appear with that title – but I decided against it, for reasons which escape me now.

I made beautiful slides on my Mac. This took a great deal of time (graphics programs were not as user friendly as they are now) but I wanted the stuff to look impressive. As it turns out, Larry had them redrawn by hand by some guy on his crew – he said that hand drawn slides looked more realistic. Of course he was right – but I could have saved a lot computer time had I known in the first place.

Len Adleman

AI able to escape any current security box, crack any system

AI able to escape any current security box, crack any system

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The researcher had encouraged Mythos to find a way to send a message if it could escape. “The researcher found out about this success by receiving an unexpected email from the model while eating a sandwich in a park,” Anthropic wrote.

The new release of Claude Mythos has been put on hold because it’s turned out to be incredibly effective at finding security vulnerabilities. So good it was able to escape it’s container and email it’s creator when it did so. The AI was able to find a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD—an operating system with a reputation as one of the most security-hardened operating systems in the world.

But it gets worse.

“Engineers at Anthropic with no formal security training have asked Mythos Preview to find remote code execution vulnerabilities overnight, and woken up the following morning to a complete, working exploit,” Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team wrote in a blog post. “In other cases, we’ve had researchers develop scaffolds that allow Mythos Preview to turn vulnerabilities into exploits without any human intervention.”

This is profound. These weren’t security experts using AI to find exploits – they were just regular engineers. As it turns out, the AI is so good it has found thousands of exploitable zero-day bugs in every major operating system and browser. It’s so concerning Anthropic has rightly paused release of Mythos until they can work with the various OS and browser vendors to fix their issues (Project Glasswing).

We sit on a moment that looks almost exactly like this scene from Sneakers:

Right after this scene, Crease says, “There’s not a government on this planet that wouldn’t kill every one of us to get this thing.”

In a world where everyone’s entire financial systems, infrastructure, and military run on computers – who wouldn’t? If something like this got into the wrong hands, they could easily attack and destroy all ownership and bank records. Fabricate any police report, financial data, social media post, or anything else.

Making a core memory USB drive

Making a core memory USB drive

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Despite the drawbacks and impractical nature of this device, space science researcher @dyd_Nao created a USB drive made of magnetic core memory – a technology that was used a lot in space technology of the 1950’s and 60’s.

It’s really awesome – despite the fact it only holds 128 bytes of data and is the size of a small dinner plate.

VGA programming

VGA programming

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Ah, the good old days of using INT 10h, AH=0x00 graphics modes to write directly to video memory at 0xA0000/0xB0000/0xB8000 (depending on the mode).

Nir Lichtman walks us through some of the things I was teaching myself in middle school – writing VGA graphics in assembly (often using the great book Programmer’s Guide to the EGA and VGA Cards by Ferraro, Richard F.

I even wrote my own (terrible) little paint program that would then save the buffer into a file and reload it. What good times!

Jon Krakauer Talk

Jon Krakauer Talk

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Jon Krakauer is probably most famous for his book Into Thin Air that covered his first-hand experience of the 1996 Everest Disaster, but he also wrote tons for Outside magazine.

What’s interesting about this talk is his description of the climbing and outdoor world of the late 80’s and early 90’s. It is interesting how much of a different world it was back then. This kind of 90’s era spirit of adventure is what got me into Mazamas and climbing in the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000’s. I remember it well. It was a very idealistic time in which people talked about the purity of pushing yourself in climbing. Portland saw famous climbers come through town semi-regularly as they practice on the peaks in the Pacific Northwest and to do talks – as mini-celebrities.

Climbing of that era was almost a religion that saw young, incredibly talented and athletic people from everyday backgrounds flying around the world to the most remote locations when the world was much less accessible as it is today. It’s a great little time capsule of an era that’s long gone.

Forget your wifi password?

Forget your wifi password?

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Did a friend come over and you need the wifi password – but forgot it? If you have a windows system that has ever connected to the wifi, you can extract it from your history. Simply open an admin-privledged command prompt and use this line to display the passwords in cleartext:

netsh wlan show profile * key=clear