Code that helped end Apartheid

https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-you-can-now-see-the-code-that-ended-apartheid/

by impish9208 • 2 years ago

362 88 2 years ago

pvg• 2 years ago

jgrahamc5• 2 years ago

So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!”—I responded.

Ha ha ha. Yes, that was literally my very short pitch to Steven about Tim Jenkin's story!

The actual DM: "I think this has the makings of a hell of a story: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o... If you want I can connect you with Tim Jenkin. One time pads! 8-bit computers! Flights attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!"

jefb• 2 years ago

Did you end up discovering the original password to the zip file? (was it, as I'd hope, `TIMBOBIMBO` ?)

jgrahamc5• 2 years ago

No, I did not. I threw quite a lot of compute power at it using bkcrack (CPU) and hashcat (GPU) but never found out what it was. It was definitely not TIMBOBIMBO, sadly!

I also ended up sponsoring the bkcrack project because the maintainer added a new option for me: https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack/pull/126

rsynnott5• 2 years ago

Though, you could argue it was a 16 bit computer, of course :)

(It was an 8088, essentially an 8086 with an 8 bit data bus, but 16bit registers and 20bit address bus).

philistine• 2 years ago

At this point in time (meaning 2024) bits for computers are a word to indicate a culture rather than the technical merits of a computer.

soulofmischief• 2 years ago

This was a great read, thank you for inspiring it! I also did not realize it was you who led the petition for the UK to apologize to Turing, what an achievement.

You're quoted at the end as saying, "The code itself is a historical document". That sort of electrified me as I began thinking about what other historical code is out there in need of preservation. I'm fascinated with stuff like this, toolkits meant to be used in the field with little room for incremental development. Tracking this kind of stuff down seems like a fun hobby.

kwar13• 2 years ago

I didn't know it was you who led the charge for the apology to Turing. Thank you!

aanet• 2 years ago

This is such a fabulous story!! Thank you, good Sir, for bringing it to light!! <3

The story reads like _The Cuckoo's Egg_ in a way. Spies, intrigue, covert comms, action, revolution!

I loved that the code is still around, and works.

Kudos!!

1970-01-012• 2 years ago

A longer version is here

https://github.com/Vulacode/Articles/blob/main/Talking%20To%...

rsynnott5• 2 years ago

You know it's _proper_ vintage crypto code because it uses the now very unfashionable word 'encipher'.

quuxplusone• 2 years ago

Funny but also thought-provoking! When did the verb "encipher" give way to "encrypt," and why? I might enjoy reading a well-researched piece on that subject.

jgrahamc5• 2 years ago

I don't know why but here's when: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=encipher%2Cenc...

spockz• 2 years ago

Interestingly enough we still say “ciphertext” to describe the encrypted “cleartext”.

BuyMyBitcoins• 2 years ago

Why is it unfashionable? I quite like it.

rsynnott5• 2 years ago

I've no idea why it died out, but it certainly seems to have.

DrillShopper• 2 years ago

I remember reading in Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography that in some cultures "encrypt" refers to the process of entombing bodies for burial and that "encipher" did not have that baggage.

Similar connotation to "decrypt" which would be exhumation.

maxbond• 2 years ago

What comes to my mind is that decipher has a well established common meaning, but decrypt just means "dis-encrypt".

gramie2• 2 years ago

Traditionally, encode meant to use one word/symbol to represent another, while encipher meant to transform one (usually mathematically) into another.

For example, "Tora, Tora, Tora" was a code that had no intrinsic meaning, but was the signal to proceed with the Pearl Harbor attack. No way to reverse that.

Meanwhile, "THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG" can be transformed with a Caesar cipher to "QEB NRFZH YOLTK CLU GRJMP LSBO QEB IXWV ALD". It can easily be reversed.

Simulacra• 2 years ago

I think it was the fishing trip with Mandela and then-Prime Minister F.W. de Klerk in 1990 that ended apartheid. Specifically when one of de Klerk's people got a hook in his hand, and a Mandela person cleaned and bandaged it. After that trip Apartheid was finally broken.

tgv• 2 years ago

That might have been the symbolic last drop that made the bucket overflow.

mschuster91• 2 years ago

Sometimes all it takes is for the right people to see at the right time that their opponent bleeds just the same red blood as they do.

bdndndndbve2• 2 years ago

What actually ended apartheid was international pressure and the white government's fear of a civil war. Economically isolated and vastly outnumbered, the apartheid government would have been completely removed from the country and had their property seized.

My understanding is Mandela was a respected leader who was willing to play ball and facilitate a peaceful transition where the white leadership got to keep all their property. That's why there's still massive economic inequality in SA today. Not to say Mandela wasn't admirable or that he didn't suffer, but it was a conscious choice to avoid outright military conflict at the cost of preserving an implicit racial hierarchy.

rsynnott5• 2 years ago

The existence of a viable ANC was arguably pretty important to the international pressure, though. Absent a viable opposition, you probably do not _want_ to exert _too_ much pressure on a rogue state, however nasty, because its only response is to either go full autarky, or collapse into complete chaos.

Take North Korea, say, another extremely nasty rogue nuclear-armed state. Even if there was a level of pressure that the international community could put on North Korea that would collapse it (it's already pretty far down the 'autarky' route), you can see that countries would be unwilling to go quite _that_ far, because there's no viable opposition and it would likely collapse in a very dangerous and ugly way.

TheBruceHimself• 2 years ago

While it certainly involved a lot of people doing the right thing, that peaceful transition was absolutely incredible and I really do think that's why non-South Africans look on Mandela so fondly. If you'd told me everything about the Apartheid right up until its collapse and then said "Ok, the ANC basically win, gain power, what do you think happens?", I'd struggle to think of any scenario where there wasn't incredible bloodshed or upheaval to the point of ruining lives beyond measure. There was so much bad blood. You'd assume that at least the people who were in charge, the people who ran the show, surely would've saw a grim end. Not even property seizures? . Somehow, Mandela led an effort that just rose above that. He probably prevented a lot of pain just by not giving into such things.

To me, the peaceful transition is the achievement. It is the amazing part of it.

ljsprague• 2 years ago

That's not why there's massive income inequality in South Africa. LOL.

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

What actually ended apartheid was international pressure

There wasn't any international pressure. There was a withdrawal of the continual and embarrassing support from Britain and the US, the only people other than Israel who hadn't been overly troubled by Apartheid. First from Britain, because as bad as she was, Thatcher was nauseated by Apartheid, then from the US who would have had to actively intervene (as they are right now in a similar context) in order to preserve Apartheid. This was only 25 years after the US had ended its own legal Apartheid.

The US political class was largely indifferent to Apartheid (aside from periodic expressions of mild disapproval of both sides and condemnation of Communist-backed terrorism), so when they saw how the wind was blowing within SA ("fear of a civil war"), and that individual domestic politicians could be damaged or gain politically through their actions towards SA, the US supported the "coup" (as always) so they could keep doing business without interruption.

So I'd instead say popular pressure among citizens of the US and Britain against their own politicians, and the resulting withdrawal of Anglo-American support. Everything else but "international pressure" I agree with totally.

nxobject3• 2 years ago

I disagree with how this post was downvoted so heavily – this in an illustrative moment of rapprochement near the end of apartheid; saying it ended apartheid was a figure of speech, of course it didn't end apartheid in and of itself. It's as reasonable as saying that the fall of the Berlin Wall ended the Cold War.

McBainiel• 2 years ago

The tech side of this is really cool but I'd also like to read more about the non-tech stuff. I wonder if the sympathetic Dutch flight attendant is still alive or the guys who actually carried the Trojan horse books to Mandela.

What an amazing story!

tow21• 2 years ago

Coincidentally I was reading this story yesterday:

https://www.londonrecruits.org.uk/index.php/items-received-s...

about the “London Recruits” in the 70s and 80s who smuggled books, leaflets, etc into apartheid SA on behalf of the ANC, doing so in such secrecy they didn’t know each others identity until 29 years after the apartheid regime fell.

Joy Leman, one of the recruits, was my late father-in-law’s colleague.

steven• 2 years ago

She is alive and hearing her recollections is super cool. If you follow the link to the short documentary I mentioned in the column you will see her then and now.

amelius• 2 years ago

Maybe in the future we can also see the code that ended democracy. (The FB source code).

farceSpherule• 2 years ago

We need to show this "code" to Israel...

SkyeForeverBlue2• 2 years ago

This is paywalled; how can I read it?

LeifCarrotson2• 2 years ago

Most paywalled articles on HN will have an archive.is link in the comments, pvg posted one here.

SkyeForeverBlue2• 2 years ago

Thank you!

RandallBrown• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/yK8Jb

LeifCarrotson2• 2 years ago

Interesting how the PKZIP password-protected compressed file is now easily decrypted in <5 minutes, but the original one-time pad is still as mathematically robust as ever.

We could have had a very different history if they'd used DES or RC2 for encryption!

rtkwe5• 2 years ago

One time pads used properly are theoretically perfectly unbreakable. The problem is making sure no one ever uses the same 'pad'/keystream twice, that your pad generation is actually random, and that the pads never fall into the hands of your adversaries. (or if they do you've been diligent about completely destroying the used pads and the other end of your communications doesn't use the captured set of pads) They're just not very good at anything other than point to point secret passing and require a real world connection to distribute.

So much of symmetric key cryptography is just trying to find creative ways of creating and recreating 'one time pads' so we can distribute the key material instead of the pads themselves.

janzer2• 2 years ago

that your pad generation is actually random

The one thing that stood out to me with the original blog post and a quick glance at the code was that it appeared as if the pad was certainly not actually random.

Could anyone that has actually understood it a bit more confirm or reject this?

Edit: It seems that the random generation can be found starting here https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/d6a1a1d694b22e6a115b... With three methods, one (RAND2) seems to use the basic interpreter rng more or less directly and the other two seem to be fairly simple prngs seeded from the basic interpreter's rng.

I don't actually know what the state of basic interpreter rngs was in the early '80s but I would be fairly surprised if they're anything that is secure.

pastage• 2 years ago

South Africa did buy at least some of Crypto AGs backdoored products, not sure when though.

rgblambda• 2 years ago

Working in the woodshop, he crafted mockups of the large keys that could unlock the prison doors.

I got to here before realising this is the same guy portrayed by Daniel Radcliffe in Escape From Pretoria. Great film.

motohagiography2• 2 years ago

I remember the activist campaigns and the movie Cry Freedom about Steve Biko, another SA activist, had a significant impact on my worldview growing up. As revolutions and coups go it was clearly a success. I'd wonder how much of a role their electronic opsec played in it.

I think it was the ANC and its activists organizing the coalition of other countries to sanction and isolate the government that ultimately caused it to yield power, which is the necessary condition for any revolution- it requires allies to be in place to support it for when it succeeds. On the ground, you only really need a few dozen people to seize some buildings and bank accounts, it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult. The opsec for that ground force just has to get most of them to their X day, where they're going to take casulties anyway.

In the case of SA, it seemed like a matter of convincing other countries to do nothing, by persuading the world the govt were just racist villains, and convincing the National Party in government that nobody would intervene to save them if there were a civil revolt. That part was organized in plain view. Opsec is interesting and mysterious, but often less important than the stories we tell about it afterwards.

nxobject3• 2 years ago

it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult.

That's actually a really good insight. It explains why quite a few successful revolutions – e.g. Russia and China – happened in countries _without_ an established administrative bureaucracy, and patted themselves on the based on their apparent competence in building one.

motohagiography2• 2 years ago

the view of coups as one faction replacing another is quite a rabbit hole, but it's a political analysis that has some experimental and predictive power. there has to be guarantor or benefactor on the other side of it. in this view, leaders are figureheads accountable to the small essential coalition who keeps them there. the idea of secret cabals orchestrating these things is usually backwards, where a revolutionary (or politician) is really just an entrepreneurial dealmaker between elite factions.

it's essentially demesquita's "logic of political survival," also distilled into the well made cartoon, "rules for rulers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

cyberax• 2 years ago

That's actually a really good insight. It explains why quite a few successful revolutions – e.g. Russia and China – happened in countries _without_ an established administrative bureaucracy

Erm.... Whut? China was (and is) _the_ example of a country held together by a civil bureaucracy. Ditto for Russia.

zellyn• 2 years ago

I remember traveling to the US from South Africa when I was 14 in 1990 and my dad renting Cry Freedom on VHS so we could watch it, since it was banned in South Africa. The long roll of peoples' names and how they died "accidentally" or "falling from window" in prison at the end was haunting and the experience of watching it has stayed vividly with me ever since.

It's hard to stress how normal _anything_ can seem when you grow up with it. I often wonder whether, if we'd stayed (we moved to the US permanently in 1992) and if apartheid had continued, whether I'd have woken up to the reality of what was going on and become more politically active in my college years. I have no confidence my sense of right and wrong would have been strong enough to escape the stifling blanket feeling of "Well, yes, it's not right, but let's not go tooooo crazy" that pervaded political feeling in those days.

Thanks for doing this, JGC. (And now that I think of it, you might enjoy the historical spelunking in the "Georg Nees" entries on my blog at zellyn.com. Code archeology is tremendously satisfying, and getting an email from one of his sons out of the blue was a delight!)

gramie2• 2 years ago

I watched the movie shortly before going to Lesotho (the enclave country Donald Woods and his family escaped to) and crossing the border into "Transkei" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantustan) at the same bridge he entered Lesotho.

To be honest, I was prepared to see all white South Africans as evil oppressors, and it took me a while to see that there was a spectrum -- many of whom I met -- from oppressors to opportunists to passive enablers to freedom/justice fighters.

One of my distant relatives in South Africa was decidedly racist, but mourned how his son had gone from playing with the children of black farmworkers to, after a stint in the South African Defence Forces, being a vicious white supremacist.

nxobject3• 2 years ago

Perhaps the only successful counterxample to "don't roll your own crypto!"

anlsh• 2 years ago

Why does a password-protected zip file reveal a list of the files within lol?

If I'm understanding this right, we'd have been hosed if the files had been TARd first?

emmelaich• 2 years ago

And then encrypted? Not sure, the known structure of tar (or zip) can help with decryption.

[edit] ...

This is addressed in the article. In fact the zip contained a zip and this helped!

He realized the zip file contained another zip file, and that since all he needed was the right original text for a specific part of the scrambled text, his best chance was using the first file name mentioned in the zip within the zip.

vidarh• 2 years ago

This article (and a lot of the other content on that site) goes into a lot more depth on Operation Vula:

https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv03445...

amai• 2 years ago

Code that helped end Apartheid

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