The Zodiac Killer's Cipher Has Been Solved After 51 Years (cnn.com) 78
"It's taken over 50 years, but the solution to the Zodiac Killer's cipher has been found," writes Slashdot reader quonset. CNN reports: Dubbed the "340 cipher," the message was unraveled by a trio of code breakers -- David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia, Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer programmer, and Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician. The Zodiac Killer is most known for leaving a trail of five unsolved murders between 1968 and 1969. He was never caught, but he gained notoriety by writing letters to police and local media up until 1974, sometimes in code, boasting of the killings. Bloody bits of clothing were included with his letters as proof of his actions. He claims he killed as many as 37 people.
Oranchak detailed the process for cracking the cipher on his website and in a YouTube video, where he used a specifically developed decryption software and a bit of luck to finally make the connection. The team used a unique program to sift through 650,000 variations of the message. In one, a couple of words appeared. "We got really lucky and found one that had part of the answer, but it wasn't obvious," Oranchak said, explaining that they then had to handpick their way through to decipher the rest of the message. The only disappointing part, Oranchak said, is that the missive contained no personally identifying information. Oranchak holds out no hope for solving the two remaining ciphers. He described the mission as "almost hopeless," as both are very short, with thousands of different names and phrases that could fit.
Oranchak detailed the process for cracking the cipher on his website and in a YouTube video, where he used a specifically developed decryption software and a bit of luck to finally make the connection. The team used a unique program to sift through 650,000 variations of the message. In one, a couple of words appeared. "We got really lucky and found one that had part of the answer, but it wasn't obvious," Oranchak said, explaining that they then had to handpick their way through to decipher the rest of the message. The only disappointing part, Oranchak said, is that the missive contained no personally identifying information. Oranchak holds out no hope for solving the two remaining ciphers. He described the mission as "almost hopeless," as both are very short, with thousands of different names and phrases that could fit.
I guess this is why (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:I guess this is why (Score:5, Funny)
He looks more educated with a beard.
Looks can be deceiving.
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Evidently you hope so. Regrettably, what you hope -- that uni degrees mean nothing -- is just your perception. And one not shared by most educated people.
Uni degrees may be over-estimated these days but they surely do show many things (both good and bad). Just like an honorable discharge from the USA military shows many things.
George W. Bush may have degrees from Harvard and Yale but Ted Cruz has degrees from Princeton and Harvard -- that says something entirely differe
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LOL, wait. You want to say he it well suited for SCOTUS, and then direct us to a video where in the first 45 seconds he makes it clear he doesn't even understand what free speech and censorship is? Free speech is about the government not censoring you. It's not about forcing a private corporation to give you a public platform to saw whatever you want. I have some thing I'd like to say about Trump, but for some reason FOX news doesn't want to put me on the air. Should I run around screaming "what about free
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Also, he reads a tweet where twitter linked an article saying voter fraud is rare, and then he goes into an entire grilling on the premise that twitter's official stance is that voter fraud does not exist and acts like he's cornered them because he has an example where one person was convicted of voter fraud. One would think a person who is SCOTUS-worthy would be able to tell the difference between those two.
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He looks more educated with a beard.
I still wouldn't go into his van.
This is your chance! (Score:2)
Get a search of Ted Cruz's documents to see if any messages match; quick!
Just a pretext to look for evidence of alien life. You know that bugger has been "probing" for years.
https://www.newyorker.com/cart... [newyorker.com]
The translation was shocking (Score:4, Funny)
I mean, he actually said "be sure to drink your Ovaltine" a couple decades before A Christmas Story was made?
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Last line: Burma Shave.
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Hope for Cicada 3301's Liber Primus? (Score:5, Interesting)
This really gives me hope that the Liber Primus [fandom.com] can be be solved soon. A few people are on it consitently and can't let it go. It looks so much easier (in terms of knowledge about the structure of the cypher) than the Codiac Cypher, but no progress has been made since 6 years.
New ideas and brilliant minds are always welcome!
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So do you think decoding the cypher could / could of lead/led to the serial killer being caught? I guess you don't know until the messages are decoded.
I find all this a bit problematic because it is a way for the killer to make themselves more infamous, they seem to be seeking glory and with these cyphers and the fancy 'zodiac killer' name they are getting it.
Perhaps serial killers should just be given numbers, Americans would no doubt scream blue murder for not being able to name societies worst people tho
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Well logically a serial killer is tied to a pattern of behaviour, there would be a minimum and maximum period between murders the maximum being how long before greater and greater chances were taken to kill and the minimum simply the build up of psychological urges as a result of being incapable of dealing with frustration in a sound reasonable manner. Search deaths through that time period for those most closely matching likely profiles, even the start of extended prison sentences starting in that time per
Here's the message (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sounds like a satanist who sold himself a lie.
Re: Here's the message (Score:3)
Urban myth. According to the FBI there is no such thing as an organized satanic church, or satanism. Every case thought to involve satanism has been perpetrated by some mentally delusional person who idolizes the idea of there being such a thing. Doing things they thought maybe a satanist might do.
Re: Here's the message (Score:2)
And here I thought they were Narcissist
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They can be both.
Re: Here's the message (Score:4, Funny)
Well there's The Satanic Temple [wikipedia.org] but sadly they're pertty disappointing on all the ritual sacrifice front.
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They don't even worship Satan. It's false advertising I tell you!
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They worship Santa. The rest is just a typo.
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According to the FBI there is no such thing as an organized satanic church, or satanism.
According to the FBI, there is no such thing as ANTIFA either. But the delusional followers bit is spot on.
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Xi Jinping
Prove me wrong.
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Urban myth. According to the FBI there is no such thing as an organized satanic church, or satanism. Every case thought to involve satanism has been perpetrated by some mentally delusional person who idolizes the idea of there being such a thing. Doing things they thought maybe a satanist might do.
Do you have a link to that statement? Anton LaVey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] started the Church if Satan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and they are still around https://www.churchofsatan.com/ [churchofsatan.com] and he made plenty of tv appearances before his death in -97 that you can find on youtube. With this said the Church of Satan has more in common with a grift than the urban myths of Satanism imnho.
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See:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree... [bbc.co.uk]
‘Satanism became my life’
If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck... you'll excuse the metaphor
It's a spiritual thing - it doesn't have to be organized and have buildings
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Most satanists are basically atheist trolls. Some do seem to have an interest in controlling other people, but in this life, not in the next, which they don't believe in.
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My experience is that satanists are hedonists, and they join because the Temple basically encourages partying and fucking. Religion barely enters into it, they just want to join a private club that might get them laid.
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Re:Here's the message (Score:5, Interesting)
Note that the "life is" is out-of-order in the cypher -- top-right in the second block, and the decoding had to temporarily ignore it for the decrypting to make sense. So there's debate about exactly where it's meant to go in the message. Most solid guess I've seen is that the message is intended to end thus:
"I am not afraid because I know that my new life will be an easy one in paradise. Life is death."
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or possibly
"I am not afraid because I know that my new life is death. Life will be an easy one in paradise."
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I think it's 72 virgins.
57 is Heinz ketchup.
23 flavors is Baskin Robbins.
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For those of you who don't want to watch the videos for the decoded message: i hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me that wasnt me on the tv show which brings up a point about me i am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise. all the sooner because i now have enough slaves to work for me where everyone else has nothing when they reach paradice so they are afraid of death i am not afraid because i know that my new life is life will be an easy one in paradise death. (original text in ALL CAPS but Slashcode does not allow it)
In other words, a schizophrenic.
Lets hope this helps (Score:2)
It might have been 51 years ago, but assuming the killer was in his 20s or 30s , there's a good chance he could still be alive so fingers crossed this small breakthrough will lead to his capture at some point. Yes, a very long shot, but one can hope.
Cracked? (Score:1)
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Huh, I'm not sure I understand you point. Your distinction sounds like an artificial one to me. Crack the code is just a saying that means to figure it out. Substitute "cipher" for "code". Same thing. It doesn't matter if they arrived at the solution my brute force or elegantly finding a flaw.
Re:Cracked? (Score:5, Interesting)
For a solid cipher, such as AES, there is no such thing as guessing it because there are trillions of different messages that "work".
Deciphering with one key leads to:
I am the egg man.
Another key leads to:
A fart smells bad.
Another key gives:
Heaters are so warm.
If someone can figure it out, and know that they got the right answer, it's not a great cipher.
In this case it was a simple substitution cipher that needed to be read in diagonal rows. What made it hard is that he fucked up and switched something halfway through.
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padding the end or beginning of a message with garbage is another option available both for AES or for a simple substitution cipher.
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Yeah padding is necessary with block ciphers such as AES (and most ciphers used today). That's because the cipher works in blocks of a particular size, so you have to expand the message to be an even multiple of the block size.
You need to be able to know what is padding and what isn't. You can't just throw random stuff on the end, because then you couldn't know what the message is reliably. Consider you send an encrypted messages with your partner:
You: How much did you demand for random?
Partner: 10570926
I can't count (Score:2)
If the last sentence was confusing, that's just because apparently I can't count. That should be:
So for example if I wanted to pad "51" to eight digits, I'd write:
51000005
The 5 at the end tells you to strip off 5 zeroes.
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You were wrong about being wrong. You only posted four padding 0's the first time.
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>> wanted to pad "51" to eight digits
> You were wrong about being wrong. You only posted four padding
3+4=7, not 8
Apparently you also can't count. Welcome to the club! :)
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You can put any amount of crap in front of a ZIP file, because it's the end signature that matters. The same concept applies here (and it's a very old idea)
P.S. and yes, that means you can make a file that is both a GIF file and a valid ZIP file.
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Using such a padding scheme makes the message vulnerable to cryptanalysis because the zeroes form a predictable crib in a predictable location.
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You've got a grain of truth there, but you mixed up key lengths vs message lengths and mixed up "all" vs "many".
For a single-block message, ALL possible plaintexts have a matching key. (By the pigeonhole principle). Because every key decrypts to something, for a single block message ANY message you dream up matches some key.
That's because the number of messages that match a key is 2^ key length and the number of messages that that fit in a single block is 2 ^ length .
For messages of more than one block, st
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> That assumption *can* be valid. IF key length is equal to or greater than block length.
That's virtually always true. Even if you reach back to 1975 for the oddball one, DES, still defined is defined as a 64-bit key. The implementation is such that 8 of those bits are used for parity, so it provides 56 bits of *security* from a 64 bit *key*.
> AND key information is sufficiently distributed and mixed with block information.
If different keys don't give different plaintexts, you don't really have a ci
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> You can "make" whatever you want the first block to be,
Indeed.
> but the chance that that single key will decrypt the next block into ascii text is something like 56^32 / 256^32 = ~7.6*10^-22 (56 = alphabet + punctuation chars.)
To be generous to your line of thought, let us assume first there is no compression. (Because compression destroys your argument and we'd not go any further). Additionally, to be generous to you let us assume no code words are used. That is, you don't say "Santa ate Houston" t
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What he said made perfect sense to me.
That's not what the pigeonhole principle says. The pigeonhole principle says that with n+1 pigeons and n holes that at least one hole must hav
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You should watch the last video on David Oranchak's web site to see the methods used to decode it, http://www.zodiackillerciphers... [zodiackillerciphers.com]
Aside from the killer's plaintext typos and misencodings (you can see in the scan of the original one symbol had even been crossed out and rewritten) there were actually construction errors in the cipher, e.g.: one whole row had been rotated right by one character. Perhaps this was an intentional move to throw off cryptographers, but I suspect they would have wanted the messag
I Will Remain A Little Skeptical For Now (Score:3)
I await an explanation of how the cipher works, and how the killer enciphered the message.
People find messages in the Bibles and so forth with regularity. The vast amount of effort to find this message makes me a little suspicious. I doubt the killer was a cryptographic mastermind.
Re:I Will Remain A Little Skeptical For Now (Score:4, Insightful)
From the video they explain how it appears the Zodiac made a mistake encoding his message and that's probably a good part of why it took so long to properly decode. The cypher isn't super complex so much as changes by accident in the middle of the message and thus you get a lot of gibberish unless you correct for the inverse in the middle of decoding it.
Re: I Will Remain A Little Skeptical For Now (Score:2)
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For a short message, use a book cipher. And don't tell anyone what book and page you used. Now you have an unbreakable message, because out of millions of page from thousands of books you'll get dozens of seemingly correct messages. And if any of you have gone to a public library, you'll note there are more than a thousand books in there.
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Primitive cypher (Score:3)
I'm surprised that the cipher took so long to break, given how primitive it is. It appears to be a polyalphabetic substitution cipher (each English letter is mapped to more than one output symbol), with a non-LTR, non-TTB order for processing the letters. I believe the sequence was moving down one and right two, and if you met the edge of the grid you simply scrolled over to the opposite side. It also appeared to have an error in the encoding, which shifted some of the letters to the left one.
It's a very simple cipher, and not based on any mathematics or other more complex constructs.
I believe the Zodiac Killer totally expected the message to be deciphered in short order, especially as it doesn't contain anything of substance besides more taunting.
The Irony ... (Score:2)
Is that his mistake probably made him feel even more superior. He misspelt paradise and he probably also made a mistake at the end as well given it makes no send even compared to its genel rambling nature.
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The Zodiac killer used that spelling on multiple occasions. They also misspelled simple words often, almost in a condescending / taunting kind of way. An example of the "paradice" spelling:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki... [wikisource.org]
I know this story (Score:2)
Drink your Ovaltine.
I just knew it was a variant of ROT13 ... (Score:2)
... V whfg xarj vg!
Misleading headline (Score:1)
ONE of Zodiac's ciphers were broken.
There are 2 other messages which still haven't been figured out.