Monday, July 12, 2010

Now You Know




A security researcher said on Thursday he was the first to crack the code embedded in the seal of the U.S. Cyber Command (Cybercom), the group responsible for protecting the country's military networks from attack.

Sean-Paul Correll, a threat researcher with antivirus vendor Panda Security, said that the characters visible in a gold ring on Cybercom's official seal represent the MD5 hash of the group's mission statement. MD5 is a 128-bit cryptographic hash most often used to verify file integrity.

A representative of Cybercom confirmed that Correll had it right. " Mr. Correll is correct...it's a MD5 hash," said Lt. Commander Steve Curry of the U.S. Navy, in an e-mail.

"It wasn't very difficult," said Correll, adding that thanks to the clue on Wired.com's Danger Room blog, it took him just a few minutes to figure out that the characters -- 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a -- were the hash value for Cybercom's mission statement.

"I knew right away it was an MD5 hash, and I was fairly confident that it wasn't a specific file," said Correll, adding that security professionals will often use an MD5 hash as reminders, or to verify that a file's contents after downloading match the original edition.

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