Financial Cryptography

A hand of Pennies

Adam points at the Underhanded C Contest. This is a good idea - write some C which is totally readable but does something underhanded. This year's challenge is to do some basic image processing but to conceal a fingerprint in the image you spit out.

I don't know whether this will work or not but it will be fun to see a new generation of hackers try (I'm too old for such tight elegant and intraverted code). Any bets as to whether the contest sponsors are in the DRM camp or the anti-DRM camp?

More news of techies fighting back to get some respect. Dbourse / slashdot / LA Times says the $100,000 Poker Bot Tournament is now ON! Tickle your PRNGs, tune and prune those search trees, limber up those card dealing digits.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| $100,000 Poker Bot Tournament                                      |
|   from the upped-my-bet-now-up-yours-robot dept.                   |
|   posted by timothy on Sunday June 12, @21:28 (Programming)        |
|   http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/12/2326207        |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

[0]Costa Galanis writes "The LA Times is reporting that a poker tournament will be held where engineers will be able to [1]pit their automatic poker-playing programs against each other in a tournament similar to the upcoming World Series of Poker main event, with a 100,000 dollar cash prize for the winning program. The article mentions how the recent rise in popularity of poker has encouraged many to try and create the poker equivalent of chess' Big Blue, the chess playing computer program that defeated the world's top chess player in a widely publicized event, and also talks about how many engineers also are trying to make bots that are good enough to play and beat human players for money in online casinos." Discuss this story at:
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/06/12/2326207
Links:
0. mailto:cgalanis@gmail.com
1. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-fi-pokerbots12jun12,0,6050364.story?track=mostemailedlink

Bruce Schneier reports in this month's Cryptogram that "Sudanese currency is printed on plain paper with very inconsistent color and image quality, and has no security features -- not even serial numbers. How does that work? Because anyone who counterfeits will be put in front of a firing squad and shot." This link doesn't check out the story, but FC historians will recall that forgery was kept to basically zero in the scottish banking period by two rules: any forged note would be paid out in full by the bank if you cooperated with their investigation, and when they found the forger they hung him.

More links in Cryptogram point to info on the T-mobile hack - it was mostly social engineering. Also a fascinating and learned article on phishing from the Honeypot projects - I learnt some good stuff in there. Check out this corker of an observation:

"Parallel phishing operations are also indicated by the timing of the first inbound HTTP request for phishing content after the UK honeypot was compromised:

2004-07-23 21:23:14.118902 XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX -> 10.2.2.120 HTTP GET /.internetBankingLogon HTTP/1.1

This inbound HTTP request to the honeypot occurred before the attackers had finished setting up the fake online banking content on the honeypot, and confirms the hypothesis that the attacker knew in advance that this server was available for use as a phishing web site. Spam messages advertising the new phishing web site were already being emailed to victims from another host, even whilst the attacker was setting up the new phishing web site."

A coordinated attack, a pincer movement! It's war out there.

Posted by iang at June 14, 2005 12:00 PM | TrackBack