Finally…A Good Use for Encryption Trading Computational Haste for Being Chaste…
t’s Freaky Friday. I’m not inspired to crank out a poem. Instead, courtesy of BoingBoing, I found this fascinating example of applied cryptography (my apologies, Bruce)…an Internet-enabled Chastity Belt featuring encryption and distributed key management:
From the Italian site promoting this abberation of science:
"The site timelock.rules.it (NoScript didn’t like this site — use at your own risk)
has a program [Timelock, $20] that allows someone to use encryption to
lock themselves up for a set or random amount of time, or even to send
the key to their chastity belt over the internet to a trusted keyholder."
The keyholder has set the Hide Timer option so you have no idea how
much time has been set. You feel the fear and the anxiety, but, with
trembling fingers, you close the lock. Your fate is now entirely in the
hands of your keyholder. Only they know how much time has been set.
Only they know the lockword, which may grant you early release. The
need to touch yourself is already overwhelming but there is nothing you
can do about it. All is as it should be.
Oh my.
I believe Amrit Williams
beta-tested this and reverse engineered the firmware via JTAG,
connecting it to the ‘Net using SCADA along with visualization and
"input" interfaces thanks to a set of VR goggles, a nintendo power
glove and a Novation AppleCat 300 baud modem that auto-dials "Uncle
Percy’s House of Pain and Panna Cotta" sending DTMF tones that spell
"STICKY" in morse code.
Maynor notified me that he’d also verified a wireless vulnerability
exists in the software, despite the fact that it has no wireless
interface. He ordered one, anyway.
I guess I was wrong about how Information Security is dead. I should have said it’s just become a perverted (yet cryptographically secure) version of itself.
Ten bucks says they use the "Blowfish" algorithm (sorry again, Bruce.) 😉
/Hoff
I real shame it isn't being sold by http://www.blowfish.com (NSFW) unless you own the firewall logs or work at the SF Armory 🙂