Cipher

It's the Lawfare Podcast.

I'm senior editor Michael Feimer, and I'm here today with Lawfare Public Service Fellow Julia Curly and former Central Intelligence Agency case officer John Cipher.

And if our whole job is trying to refix our own inside thing, at the same time the Chinese are moving forward, there's wars in Europe, Middle East is in turmoil, and all these AI is changing the way we do business and things, it's that, you know, the challenges don't stop even though we've decided to neuter ourselves and commit superpower suicide.

We'll be discussing recent events and the changing culture at the Central Intelligence Agency after the beginning of John Ratcliffe's tenure.

This is not the first time that the case officer shoved me forward in the meeting to give the summary.

Yeah.

So I was glad that Mr. Cipher and I got the chance to write this piece because there's a word going around town that Mr. Ratcliffe is the adult in the room.

You know, I mean, he has no obvious grift.

Here's the password, the key derivation count and, Here's a key derivation algorithm and lots of other metadata.

So you can actually build the Cypher collection completely dynamically, which is really, really nice.

What network hardware will have to change Yes.

I mean, we won't, we'll be able to go to Best Buy or whatever it is you have in the UK and buy an off the shelf, you know, router that is crypto happy.

And, um, yeah, I just turned on that.

I wanted, um, X35519 MLChem768 in priority zero.

Um, in the Cypher suite and group order.

And I ran this application and I connected using a browser and I was living in the future.

he decided to go to the telegraph office himself he suddenly remembered the influence of the robbery and worthington's untimely death upon the value of the western trading company's stock damn it he growled i may be left a millionaire or a pauper i don't know which and i have no ready money But the presence of Senator Durham at Newport gave him a gleam of light in these dark skies.

"'I'll telegraph to Durham in Cypher to sell a big block of this stock short at the opening of the board.

Hugh's death will carry it down twenty or thirty dollars a share, and then it will be back to normal in a week.' Suddenly he remembered the waiting Einstein.

"'Tell me,' hoarsely whispered Ferris as he dragged the lad back into the private office.

... on 57th Street, um, that The Ami from Locked in Vacancy put together.

It was, like, Shai Hulud, i- uh, MPB, Every Time I Die, Cipher.

Uh, what was the band? Fuck.

Oh, man, it's, it's, uh, Goddammit, they were from Jersey.

Leonardo Campanelli compared the numerical distributions of all three Beale ciphers.

Cipher 2 behaves in ways associated with its known book cipher method.

Ciphers 1 and 3 differ significantly from it.

The conclusion is limited but important.

The unsolved ciphers do not appear to be simple counterparts of cipher 2 made by the same process.

And they could always read back and say, okay, that's version one.

We need this particular set of Cypher primitives.

Let's read, let's decrypt it with these primitives.

But when they write it back, they would write it back as whatever the latest number was, which would be version two.

And it would be whatever the new Cypher suite is.

So you can always read the old data and you would write back using the new version.

And the way Office does it is it's an XML file.

And yeah, I just turned on that.