Wikileaks video "crypto".

[David Shaw]

On Apr 9, 2010, at 3:06 PM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> 
> Earlier this weeks, Wikileaks released of video of an incident involving
> an Apache helicopter which killed two Reuters reporters and a number of
> bystanders in Iraq.
> 
> A number of the reports surrounding the release claim that the video was
> "decrypted" by Wikileaks. Indeed, Wikileaks requested "supercomputer
> time" via twitter and other means to "decrypt" a video, see:
> http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7530875613
> 
> The video was apparently intentionally given to Wikileaks, so one can't
> imagine that the releasing parties would have wanted it to be unreadable
> by them (or that any reasonable modern cryptosystem would have be
> crackable). What, then, does the "decryption" claim mean here. Does
> anyone know?

According to an interview with Julian Assange (one of the Wikileaks founders) at http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/740/507892/text/ , the decryption was essentially passphrase guessing.   From Google Translate: "He and a team of cryptographers had then worked for about three months out.  The aim was to find among a few million of the most likely the correct passwords."

See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QEdAykXxoM around the 1:22 mark.

For what it's worth, the original encrypted file (encrypted with OpenSSL's 'enc' tool it seems) is claimed to be at http://leaks.telecomix.org/cm.rda.  They do not provide the passphrase that managed to decrypt it.

David

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