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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

They really would like for us not to think its being solved by a 14 y.o. the same morning is a debacle. But it is.

> There's a challenge out there to see who can correctly break all the layers, and, would you believe it, yesterday the coin was launched at 8:45am; we put up our web form and said, 'Hey, if you think you've got the answers, fill in the form'," she said.

It’s just a game for them to popularize code breaking and do some youth recruiting.

> It’s just a game for them to popularize code breaking

Do they really want to do that - considering these talented people might use their code breaking skills against the government? ;-)

These codes are really just little puzzles, modern cryptography has no weaknesses of the kind these codes have.

There are even sites that teach you about bad modern cryptography, like cryptohack [0] but in general the kind of skills you learn there won't be useful either unless you happen to find a piece of software that rolled their own crypto and did something really dumb (which does happen, occasionally, see the Sony PS3 hack where they used a not-so-random value for crypto, which made it broken)

[0]: https://cryptohack.org/

No doubt it's an excellent strategy to identity where any future/potential opposition may come from.

As Sun Tzu says in The Art of War:

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

What if you know the enemy, but not yourself?

I'll answer that with an examiner's question:

Please provide a T-F truth table to show that the proposition is false.

Clue: you already have the answer and Sun Tzu has provided three-quarters of it

:-)

You will spend $750B per year on a military that hasn't won a war in generations.

Or just never won a high intensity war alone.

They spent a lot of taxed money on the stunt. To have it solved the same day means almost everybody they might have engaged with it has already lost interest.

What? Its not some impossible hard code, its just a fin little exercise to get attention. It wasn’t intended to be unbreakable or take more than an hour to figure out by people interested in cryptography, the news is just that a particular 14y old was enthusiastic and also ready at the mark to speed run it.

Your attitude is equivalent to complaining about a newspaper sudoku being solved by someone early in the day, because “now no one wants to solve it and the paper wasted all that money making it”.

You really cannot perceive the difference between a few square inches on a newspaper page and a custom-minted coin?

They clearly hoped it would take at least weeks for a full solution, so they could have multiple press events. Or if not, they should have; incompetent either way.

Have you actually tried it? If ASD thinks this would take a week to crack Australia as a nation is in trouble.

Custom minted coins is not that uncommon in Australia. There's been over 100 of them.

It's not like it's a hard code. It's pretty easy to break.

It's just fun. They're not using this encryption to hide anything important. Frankly this sort of encryption solving is a bit of a dead art. Mostly the code breaking is either data engineers making the crackers more efficient, or those people looking at weaknesses of particular implementations or protocols.

Breaking custom encryption is dead in any country smaller than say, the UK or maybe Canada.

Debacle? :) It is a puzzle made to entertain and popularise the institution. People solving it is the goal.

Your comment reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/932/

That comic is spot on. Though I would say, as a developer, I would think "Someone at the CIA accidentally took down their own website briefly today"

It's getting headlines, it's exactly what they wanted. Kudos to the Australians on this one!

It is getting headlines exactly today, and never again. The goal was not to get it solved; they already knew the solution. The goal was to get a lot of people working on it. Now we know a motivated 14-y.o. can solve it in a few minutes, so it does not merit attention. "Plonk", as we used to say before endless September.

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