Sophos Cloud Optix
Here is a video showing you how to solve the RSA 2012 crypto puzzle which featured on our conference T-shirts at this year’s RSA hootenanny in San Francisco.
We’ve awarded one NERF gun prize to the first finisher, @trapflag, and a second to Robert Miller, who was randomly chosen (using a hardware random number generator made from coins and playing cards) from the 19 other successful solvers.
Winners, please email me to let me know where to send the prizes.
For those of you who didn’t finish, here’s how to do it:
(Enjoy this video? Check out more on the SophosLabs YouTube channel.)
The second stage of this puzzle involved writing code to perform a cryptographic brute force attack; although there were numerous optimisations you could apply, there were no short cuts.
That means that you really had to back yourself that your code was correctly written – so well done to all who took part, and especially to the 20 of you who cracked the puzzle in time.
If you enjoy this sort of puzzle, watch this space: we intend to run them regularly. You might also enjoy watching or trying previous #sophospuzzles!
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It would be good to point out where you're getting your RFCs next time. The challenge doesn't work with the files on ietf.org which is the official source of the RFCs. I got bored after trying zipped RFCs from 3 different sources…
Uhm, no, rfc-editor.org is the official source, which it always has been.
According to http://ietf.org/rfc.html:
"Request for Comments (RFC)
The first choice below connects to the RFC repository maintained by the IETF. The second choice connects directly to the RFC Editor's Web Page.
Be advised that there is a brief time period when the two directories will be out of sync. *When in doubt, the RFC Editor Web Page is the authoritative source page*."
Note that last sentence. If you had a slightly out-of-date version of the RFC ZIP file, you might well have been missing the most recently-added RFCs…and the two I chose for the challenge were very recent indeed. (That wasn't an accident 🙂
Hmmm, that explain it. My bad.
I have tried to attack the puzzle (RFC part) with this code: http://pastebin.com/iae07UZe
but I have no solved it 🙁
This is sick!! Amazing puzzle 🙂