Decryption of the Wikileaks helicopter video
Few days ago a Wikileaks video shocked the whole world. It shows how two Reuters journalists and other civilians were killed by gunfire out of an US helicopter.
“Finally cracked the encryption to US military video in which journalists, among others, are shot. Thanks to all who donated $/CPUs.”
(Wikileaks Tweet)
So before the disclosure the video had to get decrypted by the Wikileaks team. The question now is how they managed to blame military encryption. Bruce Schneier asked the same question to his blog readers. Two main sources have been linked:
“Daniel Schmitt, a spokesman for Wikileaks, said (…) the organization has been working for months to find and deploy powerful computers to decrypt the military videos, beginning with a request via Twitter in January that Wikileaks “needed supercomputer time.” (New York Times)
“Julian Assange, a spokesman and co-founder of Wikileaks, said (…) the material was encrypted as it was handed over to Wikileaks . He and his team of cryptographers had to work three months on the decryption. The crux was to find the right password out of a million.”* (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
So they just used some kind of dictionary attack? Maybe. But there was another interesting idea, why Wikipedia made a point on that encryption topic:
“Is it perhaps possible that wikileaks obtained a completely unencrypted video, or the encrypted video and the key, and have made up a story about an effort to decrypt it, in order to protect their source?” (Posted by: jgreco)
* No official translation from German language. See the original quotation by following the link or compare with the German version of this article.
