Calculator hackers crack OS signing key, opening a closed platform

http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/145/145154.html

by modeless • 17 years ago

111 41 17 years ago

mahmud3• 17 years ago

A man has just become immortal. TI scene will never be the same again; the TI-83 calculator turns to an open platform today (The 83 is mandatory in U.S. education and sometimes distributed for free, all American High Schoolers use it, and did so for at least the last 10 years.) Bonafide 3rd party OSes can be loaded on it now, no more shells.

Help crack the rest of the keys (Win32 and Linux clients; linux version requires X I just found out):

http://boinc.unsads.com/rsals/

Some fun statistics:

- The factorization took, in total, about 1745 hours, or a bit less than 73 days, of computation. (I've actually been working on this since early March; I had a couple of false starts and haven't been able to run the software continously.)

- My CPU, for reference, is a dual-core Athlon64 at 1900 MHz.

- The sieving database was 4.9 gigabytes and contained just over 51 million relations.

- During the "filtering" phase, Msieve was using about 2.5 gigabytes of RAM.

- The final processing involved finding the null space of a 5.4 million x 5.4 million matrix.

Eliezer• 17 years ago

Holy Cthulhu, you can crack 512-bit RSA in 73 days on a single computer these days?

blasdel2• 17 years ago

On a single ridiculously slow computer. Even the slowest Core 2 Quad would be able to factor 8x faster.

whughes• 17 years ago

Now I'm curious. First of all, any random Core Duo could probably put a significant dent in that timeframe if all he had was an Athlon 64. Second, what would the effect of CUDA be on this? It was extremely useful in that MD5 contest earlier.

jacobolus• 17 years ago

> (The 83 is mandatory in U.S. education and sometimes distributed for free, all American High Schoolers use it, and did so for at least the last 10 years.)

It's a bit off the subject, but this has always struck me as a terrible scam. For the material it is used for (introductory calculus) and the way it is used, one of these TI calculators hurts student learning and understanding more than it helps, and there is no excuse for schools to force students to purchase a $100 piece of electronics without a damn good reason. That these devices are absurdly overpriced compared to the state of the art (~$100 multipurpose netbooks, for instance), and that the models required are made by a single company with monopolistic coordination with standardized tests and textbooks, only make things worse.

Learning how to use a calculator is perhaps a useful skill, but it's one that can be learned quickly if needed and should not be pervasively required: for most math done for math's sake (that is, as opposed to computations for some engineering problem), students would be better off if teachers instead made problems that could easily be worked with pen and paper.

(Personally, I made it through high school and then up through upper-level undergraduate mathematics, physics, econometrics, etc. courses without ever buying a graphing calculator, so it’s clearly not strictly mandatory for current curricula, but students and parents get the impression that it is essential, and the vast majority of students do buy them, so the effect is about the same.)

dan_the_welder• 17 years ago

And now a cracked OS allows cheating since they have an approved 'test mode" to prevent access to stored files.

http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/homePage/ns...

So blinking the led without any access blocking will be an early task for the subversive TI hacker.

jrockway• 17 years ago

Yeah, I never saw the point of the TI-83.

The TI-89 is nice, but there is no point in having your CAS running on a handheld device anymore. Might as well give everyone a computer with Mathematica.

rflrob• 17 years ago

>(Personally, I made it through high school and then up through upper-level undergraduate mathematics, physics, econometrics, etc. courses without ever buying a graphing calculator, so it’s clearly not strictly mandatory for current curricula, but students and parents get the impression that it is essential, and the vast majority of students do buy them, so the effect is about the same.)

It's actually much harder to make it through high school math without a calculator than the upper-level stuff. At the end of my senior year in college, I tried to fire up my TI-89, only to discover the batteries had run out, and I had no clue when that happened.

charlesju• 17 years ago

I have the exact opposite reaction to graphing calculators. I used them to ace my SAT IIs back in the day simply because I understood all the functions of my calculator than every other non-hacker in the room. I even used to program small BASIC games on it when I was bored in class. There still isn't a good device to program on that is inconspicuous in the classroom.

jacquesm5• 17 years ago

It doesn't take much to become immortal does it?

mahmud3• 17 years ago

don't you dare piss off a generation of calcers, jacquesm ;-) this is our holly grail, there are many others like it, but this is ours.

[Edit: inserted smiley so not to appear "touchy" :-P ]

icefox3• 17 years ago

Might be fun to try making a javascript workers version. While it is not as powerful I am curious how many more users you can get.

tsuraan• 17 years ago

Do you have any refs for the TI83 being mandatory in US high schools? A quick google search puts your post at the top and nothing too relevant anywhere else. I graduated from a public HS less than ten years ago, and I used the far superior HP-48G throughout the entire thing :) I never took math classes from my HS, but I do remember my friends who were taking HS courses having an assortment of TI81 - TI89 calcs.

eslifka• 17 years ago

I don't have any references for you, but my middle school and highschool required graphing calculators. And they very strongly pushed the ti-83+, claiming that students would be horribly lost if they couldn't follow along with the teacher's instructions. In reality the teachers were all incompetent with the calculators and the school wanted everyone to have an 83+ because that was the only platform on which the teachers knew the process for erasing the memory.

blasdel2• 17 years ago

Unfortunately it's a ridiculously shitty hardware platform to be developing for in 2009. It's a motherfucking Z80, for $100 -- a vintage Game Boy minus any decent sprite graphics hardware, with enormous profit margins and a captive market (enforced by regulation) of a million a year.

Yes, the OS on the TI-83 is dogshit, but I have a feeling that it's pushing the limits of what's reasonable on the hardware. The TI-89 has a terrific input language and OS (almost mac-like compared the the apple-II-ness of the 83), but running on a m68k.

Who knows, maybe someone can at least make a firmware that not only forces you to close your parentheses, but gives you some benefit for doing so.

jsonscripter2• 17 years ago

But... it's a calculator!

And it has a headphone jack! And a bitmap screen! And a full keyboard!

mtrimpe• 17 years ago

Oh those good memories of the TI-83, my first and only foray into the world of assembler programming, trying to cram a complex algorithm in 6 registers, the good times!

mahmud3• 17 years ago

You mean five registers, all of them accessible through the sixth! I had a nice hand written note for register allocation for the Z-80; I used an stack-based IR and mapped the TOS to #A. I hope to god my parents haven't trashed my stuff, would love to see those perversions again :-)

erlanger• 17 years ago

So, we can get a native MirageOS? Nice.

zokier• 17 years ago

What about my oldskool TI-86? No love for that? :(

makmanalp2• 17 years ago

What's the legality of this, I wonder? (Toying with the idea of joining the compute cluster or not)

icefox3• 17 years ago

The post on TI forum reminds me of when decss was cracked and an email was sent to the list saying something like: "Here are some random numbers that are good for initializing your card game shufflers and stuff like that" Followed by several dozen keys. It got printed out and put on a dorm room door :)

xcombinator• 17 years ago

hehe, I remember trying to convince my teacher for letting me use the nintendo DS on exams. You have to try, it's funny to see their faces.

Now you can use: 1.Nintendo DS. You can make or port(from linux) whatever you want in c, import Lapack libraries, use eigenmath homebrew for everything else. 2.Iphone.Good support for c too. 3. netbooks...

srt19170• 17 years ago

Isn't this at least technically illegal? (DCMA)

kragen3• 17 years ago

You mean DMCA, and IANAL but probably not. The calculator's OS may be a copyrighted work, but the calculator itself is not.

ams6110• 17 years ago

I guess I have a little taste of what the guys who went thorough school using slide rules felt like when calculators that could do trig functions came out.

I went through high school trig, calculus, and undergraduate college math classes with nothing more than a standard 10-digit "scientific" calculator. Graphs? You plotted those with a pencil.

Calculator hackers crack OS signing key, opening a closed platform

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