Hezbollah guerrillas were able to hack into Israeli radio communications during last month's battles in south Lebanon, an intelligence breakthrough that helped them thwart Israeli tank assaults, according to Hezbollah and Lebanese officials.

Wow! Key management problem?

Hezbollah cracked the code

] Eli Biham announced new results in cryptanalyzing SHA-1,
] including a collision in a reduced-round version of
] SHA-1. The full SHA-1 algorithm does 80 rounds of
] scrambling. At present, Biham and Chen can break
] versions of SHA-1 that use up to about 40 rounds, and
] they seem confident that their attacks can be extended to
] more rounds. This is a significant advance, but it's
] well short of the dramatic full break that was rumored.
]
] Where does this leave us? MD5 is fatally wounded; its
] use will be phased out. SHA-1 is still alive but the
] vultures are circling. A gradual transition away from
] SHA-1 will now start. The first stage will be a debate
] about alternatives, leading (I hope) to a consensus among
] practicing cryptographers about what the substitute will
] be.

Answer, not a 5 alarm fire, but if you write or maintain cryptography code you can still expect some work coming up.

Followup on SHA-1 break

The design and strength of all key lengths of the AES algorithm (i.e., 128, 192 and 256) are sufficient to protect classified information up to the SECRET level. TOP SECRET information will require use of either the 192 or 256 key lengths.

This essentially means that AES as at least as good as the algorithms the NSA develops for this purpose. Very impressive.

Policy Says AES OK for National Security Info

Rerecommending with some changes to Elonka's text:

The Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters has 4 sections of code on it. The first three have been solved. In 1999 there was a big media splash as Jim Gillogly announced his solution, which had been obtained via a computer attack. Part 4 (the last 97 characters) is as yet unsolved.

I wish I could say that I'd solved Part 4, but I haven't (yet). What I *did* do this week though, was come up with a new solution technique for part 3 which I believe to be the "pencil and paper" method that the original authors of the sculpture intended to be used. It's a way of eyeballing the code, such that anyone with access to the ciphertext ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/july99/kryptoscode19.htm ) could quickly make a grid and check the letters off to get the entire message. -- no elaborate mathematical formulae or number-crunchers required.

I've written to Gillogly and a couple other cryptographers to check my work. If anyone else would like to take a look in the meantime, I've got a page describing the technique which is posted at my Kryptos site:

Elonka's Solution to Part 3 of Kryptos