This is a project about censorship, encryption and entertainment news.
————————————————————————–
Project brief – Ciphertexts and cryptoblobs
In a simple sentence. We were asked to design a encryption and decryption system that comments on the current issue with the NSA. In an age where we are under constant surveillance, how should we evaluated privacy?
Here is a road map of the project:
Brief
Encoding/decoding exercise 1
Encoding/decoding exercise 2
Encoding/decoding exercise 3
Final project
——————————————————————————————-
Exercise 1
“Use text analysis tool to analyze your email, how would you see them differently&how would you interpret the result?”
I decided to use the text analysis of my email to reconstruct the user based on the report. What can you tell about this person when you look at his/her email?
Follow this link to try it for yourself.
(hint: hover over words and follow the paragraph)
——————————————————————————————-
Exercise 2
“What more can you do?”
This is still a text based transmission. The system consist of three things: key, letter board and a flash light.
The letter board is an 8×8 board with 64 pins. Each pin has the entire alphabet around itself. The location of letters on each ring are different.
Key of the encryption takes form in a set of numbers and letters. These sets can be hosted on a web server or sent as images in correct order.
A flash light is used to the board to interpret the key.
To decrypt, follow the set of cards on the key. Each card represent each letter in the message. The first card tells you how to place the board: ring with letter A should be at lower left and ring with letter B should be at lower right. Second card starts with the first letter. Starting from top left, vertical pins count from A to H while horizontal pins count from 1 to 8. For the first letter, (card no.2) place your flashlight directly over G6 and look at C6. Shadow of pin C6 should point at your first letter. Repeat the same process till the last card.
Here is a video to explain how this works:
——————————————————————————————-
Exercise 3
“now do even more”
This time I tried to use regular expression to make a decryption program.
Follow this link to try it for yourself.
(hint: the key is [HACKER])
——————————————————————————————-
Final Project
(This project is completed by me and Lin He. Lin was responsible for all programing related parts of the project.)
“Another encryption/decryption project that comments on the current issue with the NSA.”
In countries where you can’t, or it’s difficult to publish sensitive or inflammatory information online, how to send a message securely though a social networking platform? Since my goal is to get the message to as many people as possible while bypassing government surveillance, I decided to build something that allow you to hid your message in plain sight.
“LindsayLohan stealing jail drugs,.”
This is a tool to help you hide sensitive information behind entertainment news. For example:
Bradly Manning
Justin Bieber
You have to have an access code to use this tool, and an access can only be generated from a invitation code that you get from someone that’s already in the system.
Encode: Type your message and hit generate. You can keep hitting the button until something that make sense come up.Connect the system to you twitter account and you can tweet the generated message though the system.
Decode: When you are looking at your twitter feed though the system, click “reveal” to see which tweets have encoded message behind them. Encoded tweets will be highlighted in yellow. Click on the tweets to reveal the true message.
Here is a video showing how it works: (runtime: 1min)
And follow this link to try it for yourself.
READ THIS FIRST BEFORE YOU TRY!!!
current issues (as of 12/15/2013)
-Due to library mismatch, please use one of these text as your plain text if you want to see the decoding parts to work. (type whatever you want and hit encode if you just want to see the encoding part)
Merchants of death and nuclear weapons
Japan is killing the whales
BradlyManning and the failure of corporate media
Billionaires rising wealth intensifies
-If nothing happens when you hit encode, refresh the page and try again.
-Once you are connected to twitter please do not refresh the tweeter feed or tweet message too frequently. Twitter API has a limit on the number of request per minutes. If you see an error page when you try to access the twitter feed, wait about 5 mins and come back.
-If you hit reveal button and nothing happens, refresh the page and try again.
-Use invitation code 2xcp5f (case sensitive) to get your passcode. Use passcode 2XAZE (case sensitive) if you just want to get in.
Under the hood:
-Twitter API is used to get live feed and tweet to your account
-RiTa.js, a natural language processing script is used to identify word properties in any given sentence. The categorizations of words is based on the Penn Treebank project.
-A library of words (mostly found in entertainment news) is created for word replacement.
For example, a sentence is being broke down by RiTa like this:
Billionaires rising wealth intensifies
Billionaires/nnps rising/vbg wealth/nn intensifies/nns
nnps: proper noun, plural
vbg: verb, present particle
nn: noun
nns: noun, plural
Then the program randomly pick words from each category to construct the new sentence:
Billionaires rising wealth intensifies
LindsayLohan stealing jail drugs,.
Note that “,.” is being added to the end of the new sentence for identification.
When you tweet the new sentence, the plain text is being saved to our secure server for later retrieval.
When you click on the new sentence in your twitter feed, RiTa takes the format of the sentence (nnps/vbg/nn/nns) and cross check with sentences that are on our server to find the match.
“LindsayLohan stealing jail drugs,.” and “Billionaires rising wealth intensifies” have the same structure.
