Merry Christmas 15
Lonnie Clay
Merry Christmas 15 - The Dunderhead Code
Ever wondered about people who can't spell, or who intentionally garble their text the way that John Winston does in alt.alien.visitors? Well then to give you something new to worry about if you are a government spook, may I present to you THE DUNDERHEAD CODE! Here is a sample, just look at those dashes substituting for letters in words :
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.alien.visitors/8anKvl1I1wk
Characteristics of a hypothetical Dunderhead Code :
1) Vary the crypto key depending upon the week of the year and day of the week of post.
2) The paragraph number [K] + the sentence number within paragraph [L] + the word number within sentence [M] + the character number within word [N] indexes to :
3) Lookup table for the correct character which should have been used.
4) If a misspelled word is used rather than the simple dash of John Winston's cute garbling, then the lookup table contains text strings of misspelled words for comparison, along with a code value for each possible match. That code value may be a string of some type, including but not limited to a single word.
Implications of those specifications :
1) There is not much information in a specific post. Perhaps it would be a phone number and date plus time to call, or an address and name to ask for, or a crypto key for posts found at a previously agreed upon location like a website forum or blog with apparently random words being spewed out, supposedly by a sporger. Will the gentleman who inquired regarding such spews on sci.crypt a few months ago please take note?
2) If the silly dash code of John Winston is not used, but instead there are used codes of misspelled words, then what is to prevent an even more subtle code using grammatical errors such as sentence structure flaws or punctuation errors from being used? Nothing prevents such variations.
3) If it is your job to decide whether information is being passed surreptitiously, then you might have to worry about even further subtleties such as the use of inappropriate synonyms. Also consider that the sentence diagram tree may be a key to decoding meaning, with different interpretations depending upon whether the word appears in a prepositional phrase or in some other type of modifier clause, just to give a specific example.
4) An even more subtle code might be used which involves elided words, but that might be going a bit too far. A bit of an imaginative stretch - eh what?
5) What can you do to detect the cryptographers when they are buried in a horde of sloppy users of language? You look for the unusual. PATTERNS. For example, with spell checkers there is really no excuse for misspelling as a habit. So make serious eye tracks upon someone who (despite spellchecking) persists in misspelling words. A red flag would go up in my mind if I saw the same word spelled three different ways in a single document, just to give an example. If there are lots of documents originating from the same person, then you might notice and become alert if (to give an example) the third word in the second sentence of the fourth paragraph was ALWAYS misspelled regardless of what the word might be.
6) So you spotted a guy, what can you do? Before you nab that person, track internet site users who are frequent visitors, deducing the network of users of the code. Simultaneous swoop…
7) Ever read "The Santaroga Barrier" by Frank Herbert?
Merry Christmas in July!
Lonnie Courtney Clay