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Comment by adverbly

4 days ago

I'm no crypto expert at all but isn't TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG an actual word?

Google says it translates to "troops shift"

If so, I don't understand how this was difficult at all... Can't you just do a dictionary attack and then check if the resulting phrase forms a sentence?

I don't understand how this couldn't be done by someone in their house with access to a computer and a German dictionary.

Maybe I'm messing something? Was the rearranging of the letters random in some non-deterministic way that wasn't known up front?

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adverbly

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zamadatix  4 days ago

The article even says it was "easier" than that - it is a word in a list of known codewords (but slightly off the expected time).

The hard part is not that it's impossible for you to do at home, it's that nobody in 100 years has felt it was worth enough effort to try through enough words until the effort was as simple as prompting the LLM to do the work.

Not every value of AI has to be in the realm of superhuman intelligence, that's just what makes for the most discussion.

kenjackson  4 days ago

Turns out that humans aren’t great at comprehensively consistently searching known search spaces.

qtrz-qpo  4 days ago

Yes, it is an actual word. More than that, it is used as an example in “The History and Principles of German Military Ciphers, 1914–1918”.

But let us use this and tell politicians that "Astra broke SOTA encryption", so AI must be banned.

fwip  3 days ago

Yeah, you're right. Writing a program to solve ciphers with dictionary keys was an assignment in my intro to cryptography course - there's a couple of easy tricks you can do on the output to rapidly filter to the right solution.

unreal37  3 days ago

Also the letters of the word were rearranged to alphabetical order. And duplicate letters were removed.

So it's not just a dictionary attack. It's that plus modifying the word before using it.