Required reading for all players

[Googlie]

Somehow a hacker has broken the encryptions of the passwords in the gamesave file, and has e-mailed them to Tassadar, who immediately contacted me. (Tass does not know the identity of the hacker, but that individual did reference the posts surrounding "the Tassadar Manouever" and prefaced his e-mail - which Tass forwarded to me - with "You'll find this of interest"

Disbelieveing that this could be done, he tried them, and to his amazement they worked. To my amazement as well, when I tried them after responding to tass "but they are nor the correct passwords"

We (Tass and I) have been discussing what to do for the past couple of hours.

With one exception, the hacked passwords are not the actual ones that I set (and which I sent to faction leaders) but they do open the turns). To verify this I have (will) send the alternate hacked password to each leader and you can confirm this.

As a result, Tass will immediately have to quit the Hive.

The role once envisioned for him to assist me as co-moderator will be revived, and he and I will work together to ensure the best gaming experience for the players.

(The timing is appositre as well, as I will be off for three weeks from Sept 2nd with almost no internet access)

So Tass will soon be applying to each faction for accreditation, and I am asking the private forum moderators to give him the same rights and priveleges that I have.

Feel free to post comments in this thread after you have confirmed the alternate password

Googlie

[Jamski]

Where's that stunned smilie again?

Congrats to Tass for being so honest Who would hack the ACDG though?

-Jam

[Maniac]

<---

What's the e-mail addy of the person who sent the passwords to Tassadar?

Disbelieveing that this could be done, he tried them, and to his amazement they worked.

Couldn't Tass just PM you without trying first?



Edit: In the meanwhile, waiting for the alternative password.

[MrWhereItsAt]

There's an interesting array of viruses around nowadays - would it be possible to send whoever it is a tonne of them?

[Archaic]

Two things.

Firstly, which faction was the one where the password was the same as the original? I already know it's not the PUT, so who was it?

Secondly.....I won't be granting access to the University datalinks to Tass, and if he doesn't like that, he can go jump. And if my people don't like that, well....they can vote me out after we switch to Democracy.

[Googlie]

Well - to amswer a number of questions:

the "informant" is:

hackerz0r@yahoo.com

or at least it displayed as: (RazorBlade:hackerz0r@yahoo.com)

The Hive's was the one that matched the original

And while some may be able to live without succumbing to temptation I think for most of us the instinct would be to try them to see if Razor blade was full of it or not.

My theory (unproven, but having "slept on it") is that RB knew the Hive password, and from that knowledge deduced where in the file the password interrogation and answer lay, and added these alternate passwords, as they bear little resemblance to the originals.

I have (will) also e-mail them (their respective ones) to the alternate turn-players, Maniac, Kody (oh - no need to as that didn't have an alternate, being the original), johndmuller et al

And Archaic: Tass already (now) has access to the PUT gameturns - it's only the Private Forums he can't visit.

I did test these alternate passwords on a number of extant PBEMs I had on file to see if they were "backdoor" generic, and none worked (see Buster's reasoned reply in the CGN forums, reproduced below):

***************************************

Originally posted by Buster in the CGN Froum

This is a problem of course but not exactly surprising. I don't imagine Reynolds used a very heavy encryption scheme so knowing how the basic file-structure looks I imagine a determined probably would be able to break it in a reletively short time.

The reason this is the first time it comes up is probably that noone with the needed skills bothered to try to break it yet.

The fact that other passwords than the actual one works could be either because they are backdoors (generic passwords that always work), this could be tested by checking some other pbems that contain the same factions, or because the password has to match some check or pattern stored in the file rather than the original in which case there would potentially be several fits besides the original and you could find one by bombarding it with a dictionary.

The last is the least worrying as at least it means that you need a hacker with skills and special software to crack the passwords of a given game. If the first is true we have a situation where if the pws get out every game is compromised.

Suggest you check it by creating a pbem using same factions but other passwords. Check if the wrong but working passwords you were given also work on the other game. If so you have a backdoor and these passwords should be kept secret and tassador should take whatever action he can to ensure they do not get out. If they don't work - it is simply a mattter that there are several matches besides the original. In this case all we now know is that the passwords can be cracked if you know how and have the tools.

As said the last is not really surprising and the reason we have not heard of it getting done before is probably that the measures needed are beyond what users without special skills can do.

If this hacker guy were to make a "how to easily extract a password in three easy steps" guide or a program doing it automatically and release it we would now have all pbems open to everyone.

Tassador should urge him not to do so. He will not earn fame inside the small AC community who will be the only ones who cares. As said - if you are a skilled hacker I don't imagine AC saves are any kind of major challenge compared to whatever else they manage to crack out there and his efforts won't get him any appreciation.

All it will be is just be another nail for the games still undeserved coffin.

So far we have been nicely free of savegame editors, password extractors etc. because I guess the ones interested were a small group so the few in the group who could potentially do such were decent enough not to. Lets hope it stays that way.

[FlameFlash]

Oh, this looks like great fun.

[Hercules]

First I haven't tried the alternative I will take your word for it.

re your suggestion re Tassador, I am polling opinion in our private forum.

Third, at the outset we all agreed that intregity and honesty in playing was the key. All of us have strange applicants to join our factions, some may have crept in, though that is not the issue here.

Maybe the way forward now is to do what most pbem games do. Post notification in the turn track thread but not the turn itself. Instead send to 3/4 leading members of the next faction and let them distribute it within their own faction. So even if you do have the passwords or alternatives unless you have the save you will soon be out of date.

I think Buster has got it correct in his post.

[Maniac]

My theory (unproven, but having "slept on it") is that RB knew the Hive password, and from that knowledge deduced where in the file the password interrogation and answer lay, and added these alternate passwords, as they bear little resemblance to the originals.

How could RazorBlade have added alternate passwords??? The only way I see, presuming that he worked from the Hive password, is that "RazorBlade" is one of the Hive turn players, who consciously meddled with the ACDG turn before posting it in the turn tracking thread.

[Snowflake]

I agree that Captain Herclues has a good idea to deal with this. I know that other cheats exist that could have made the game entirely unplayable, but the game has survived so far based on players' integrity and honor. I believe in the ACDG we have to largely rely on the same thing once again.

[Googlie]

Originally posted by Buster in the CGN Forum
or because the password has to match some check or pattern stored in the file rather than the original in which case there would potentially be several fits besides the original and you could find one by bombarding it with a dictionary.

The last is the least worrying as at least it means that you need a hacker with skills and special software to crack the passwords of a given game.

After some replays, this is what it appears to be.

The hacked passwords are not generic "backdoor" ones, as they don't work with the original game (remember that we restarted the game - the original Hive turn is still hanging in the turn reporting thread)

Nor does my - or Maniac's - theory of recently added, alternate passwords hold water. They work with the restarted Hive and Uni 2105/6 turns (also still hanging in the turn reporting thread)

So Buster's theory that there are prolly several combinations that work with any one "official" password would seem to hold true.

As i had assigned Buster his usual PBEM password I have asked him to check in other games to see if the "hacked" one will also open those turns (even with a different faction than the Drones.) If it does, then that would validate his theory.

G.

[Maniac]

So Buster's theory that there are prolly several combinations that work with any one "official" password would seem to hold true.

I don't understand what that means. Do you mean that for example if "victory" was the official password, that "yrotciv" would also work? How then can the complete non-resemblance between the official and alternate passwords be explained?

[DeathByTheSword]

....that is all i can say...the cycon is very shaken by this news...

[johndmuller]

Well isn't this fun?

I must have read Googlie's email about this just before Poly went down for the day, cause it seems that I've had entirely too much time to think about this, mostly reinventing the wheels that have already been posted here.

In our (pirates) case, the alternate password is so appropriarte that the notion that it just happened to parse into the same encrypted internal representation as the real password is incredibly difficult to believe, unless the encryption is so totally simplistic that thousands of alternate passwords exist and the hacker could have his pick. I don't know about the rest of your alternates (and don't tell me what they are either), but ours was every bit as directly related to our faction as the ones the Googster himself assigns in games he CMN's, so if yours were also closely related to your faction, then the odds would infinitely surpass astronomical. Of course, only the PUT and ourselves have factions that a non SMAC person would easily understand, so oddly tangential passwords might qualify too - in fact, any non-gibberish alternate pw is most unlikely in this scenario. Perhaps your alternate pw's are all gibberish, and ours was a once in a million lifetimes coincidence, but somehow I expect you all to have Googlie style passwords.

I tested our alternate out in 1 other PBEM .sav file I had and to my relief it did not work, but that doesn't really rule out there being a modest set of alternate pw's for each faction that rotate according to some arbitrary determinent that each game generates and saves, so until a lot of people have tried out a lot of games, the possibility of there being hardwired passwords of some sort can't be completely ruled out (although evidence to date is encouraging).

I can imagine that the game could have some kind of undocumented (and presumably unused) provision for alternate passwords - it would actuallly be useful - a provision that didn't survive the final cut, but much of whose code is still in the program. I can easily imagine a hacker armed with a real password tracing the code while it executed the password check and figuring out what it did. If there was such vestigial alternate pw code in there, it would make it very easy for the hacker to use that info to know how &/or where to stuff their new ones.

Having had too much time to think about this, I even thought of a scenario where a very good hacker (and at this point you have to ask yourself why a very good hacker would bother with this) could modify the save file in such a way as to create a backdoor into our computers (using one of those techniques you read about like buffer overflows, however they do their thing) - and this would be one of the hard to believe parts - and having gotten this backdoor into our computers while we are running this modified save file, the hacker uses his control of our computer only to fool it into accepting one of these alternate passwords, not to attack Microsoft or the Pentagon, or to transfer our life savings to his Swiss Bank account (Have you checked yours today?), but just so they can impress Tass with how good a hacker they are.

Assuming that the Pandora's box of hardwired backdoor passwords has not been discovered here, that it is some hack or other that would have to be done to each each PBEM separately - assuming that, the next most disturbing thing is that if this exploit entailed somehow inserting these alternate passwords into the game file, that implies the complicity of one of the players with access to the turn file that ultimately is used as the "real' turn and passed along through the chain. Unless some of the factions have strange (and probably prohibitively time consuming) turn handling procedures, we are talking about a very limited number of people, especially if it were to develop that this exploit only worked after a certain point in the game, and save files from before that point would not respond to the new pw's.

The point here is that if this required the modification of the save file to work, which seems possible, and maybe even probable, then it also required some one of us to do it consciously (i.e. the hacker is one of us) or else it required one of us to knowingly replace the game file with one they had gotten from a Hacker and then send it on to the rest of us unsuspecting innocents to run on our machines with potentially really unpleasant consequences. How irresponsible can you get? I really hope that one of those incredibly unlikely scenarios is true instead.

[Nubclear]

Greetings!

Yes, this was quite shocking as I thought it was from someone (maybe Looniversity or Drones) wanting to flame me, but when I opened it...The words shocked me.

Maniac: I would not have taken the email seriously had the passwords not worked.
MWIA: Unfortunately, the only virus I have a sample of is SirCam, but thats not effective enough for this infidel
Archaic: Googlie and I suspected this, however all I need is access to your save files which I now already have. Your forums are unimportant to me.
Hercules: I do appreciate you upholding democracy and if I do indeed get access to your forums, I will wave a magick wand and near a certain base, a fountain of Xenorum shall appear which shall feed all of Peace!!!

I don't know why anyone would take the time to hack an ACDG file. It seems that there are more important targets out there, and obviously someone in the ACDG (probably in the Hive) did set out to hack these files.
As I asked GooglieGod: Why would they send them to me? I do know that certain peoples propaganda against me did give me a reputation of a cheater, however I've already turned myself in once...It makes no sense.
And who could it be? The few people I suspect (and have talked with GooglieGod about) are HIGHLY unlikely. For a moment, I did suspect someone, in a twisted plot to try to get me thrown out of the ACDG, did this.

Anyway, I am deeply shocked and appaled at the actions of this person and if they thought they were doing me any favors....I did not and do not want them. If you are reading this...Heed my call. While I may become a god due to your actions, they have tainted the game and if your intentions truely were to please me in some perverse way, I would be more pleased if you did not do any other actions of this sort.

Googlie: I doubt that the passwords were created through a generator as the password for CyCon and the backdoor for it were too different. However I may be wrong.

[johndmuller]

I tested several of the earliest files I had in my archives and had the following results.

Using a turn said to be 2102 from the original cut of the game, I was unable to open our game file with the alternate password.

Using a turn said to be 2102 from the restarted version of the game, I was able to open the turn with the alternate password.

I'm not sure what this proves, as the restarted version of the game had different passwords and being a restart could also have created different backdoor hardwired passwords if the game has something like that already built in by Firaxis. So if it needed the file to be altered for the hack to work, it happened in the first turn, before it got to us.

Since we are one of the last factions in turn order, about all I think I can say for sure is that Buster and the Drones are definitely innocent of altering the file, as they had not yet had a chance to touch it. I know that I didn't insert any funny stuff into the save file, but it would take a save file from earlier in turn to show that - certainly if Googlie still has the original file he sent out, that could be very revealing.

[Nubclear]

Hmm...That leaves the Hive as the most likely to have someone whom altered it, with the next being possible and the next being highly unlikely.

[Maniac]

I just tested the alternative password on both the 2105 and 2130 save. It works indeed.

I really don't get it how this is possible.
The "generic password theory is proved invalid. The "recently added password theory" is impossible too (unless they were added before 2104 ). And as the official and alternative passwords bear no resemblance, I don't see how the "combination password theory" can be true (though I don't really understand what buster means with that theory).

For a moment, I did suspect someone, in a twisted plot to try to get me thrown out of the ACDG, did this.

Wise decision to edit your post.

I doubt that the passwords were created through a generator as the password for CyCon and the backdoor for it were too different.

We have an original password, don't we?

Hmm...That leaves the Hive as the most likely to have someone whom altered it, with the next being possible and the next being highly unlikely.

I don't see how anyone else besides the turn player could have made any modifications. For the Hive that would be Voltaire at that time. I find it hard to believe he would be related.

[Nubclear]

Originally posted by Maniac
I just tested the alternative password on both the 2105 and 2130 save. It works indeed.

I really don't get it how this is possible.
The "generic password theory is proved invalid. The "recently added password theory" is impossible too (unless they were added before 2104 ). And as the official and alternative passwords bear no resemblance, I don't see how the "combination password theory" can be true (though I don't really understand what buster means with that theory).

Well, at least this all gives us something to ponder.

Wise decision to edit your post.

Edit my post! Whatever do you mean?

We have an original password, don't we?

I've never seen a password with such...implied meaning!!!

I don't see how anyone else besides the turn player could have made any modifications. For the Hive that would be Voltaire at that time. I find it hard to believe he would be related.

Hmm....I have a hard time believing Voltaire could do this. But he didnt play all the turns though....

AARRRGGGHHH!!!!!

[Googlie]

Originally posted by Googlie

As I had assigned Buster his usual PBEM password I have asked him to check in other games to see if the "hacked" one will also open those turns (even with a different faction than the Drones.) If it does, then that would validate his theory.

G.

Interesting development.

I have some old PBEMs that I CMN'd on file on my laptop, including a couple that feature Buster.

The "hacked" password for the ACDG Drones also opens his turns - in one game as the Drones again, but in the other as the Hive

So there has not been a "tamper" with the gamesave files, but Buster's theory of a number of applicable passwords holds water. Razor Blade simply found appropriate alternates

G.

[johndmuller]

Originally posted by Maniac

Quote:

So Buster's theory that there are prolly several combinations that work with any one "official" password would seem to hold true.

I don't understand what that means. Do you mean that for example if "victory" was the official password, that "yrotciv" would also work? How then can the complete non-resemblance between the official and alternate passwords be explained?

If you're still wondering about this mechanism, consider this simplistic version:

Say the password is "hack', that is represented in memory as some string of bits, recognizible as "hack" if considered to be a string of letters. At the same time, it could be considered also as a string of bits representing a number and operated on mathematically, say by multiplying it by 37. The computer saves your password as whatever that string of bits would be ("hack" * 37), or perhaps only selected bits of that result, like the rightmost 8 bits.

Most likely it would no longer be translatable into regular alphabetic characters anymore and would be difficult for anyone to locate in a dump of the file and recognize as a password. Even if someone did, they would not necessarily know how to work backwards to the original "hack". Thus, you have reasonably decent security without needing a PhD.

Given a simple enough algorithm and/or especially if you save only a portion of the result, it is entirely possible for another input, like "wild card" to also generate the same internal representation ("wild card" and "hack" are just an example and in all likelihood do not generate the same result when multiplied by 37 and stripping selected bits).

Anyway, if the hacker read the code and discovered the 37 multiplier, the bit selection and the storage location for the encrypted version of the passwords, they could conceivably work backwards to figure a string which would generate that encrypted result. In all likelihood, it would be gibberish-crap, but with the right software and a dictionary-like file, it would be possible to locate any real words or phrases that fit the bill, if any exist, and they could then take their pick and email them to Tass, who has demonstrated a willingness to go public with such info. (If they had mailed them to the Pirates, maybe the Cuspidore would suddenly act like he knew what he was doing (as well as what everyone else was doing) instead of acting like a normal boorish lout!)

So what we need to ask in this witch hunt is: Who is playing like they know what they are doing .

[Googlie]

Right.

Who has the tech lead in 2130?

Why, Cap'n Hook, of course

There you have it.

That string of bits wasn't "hack" * 37 at all, but "hook" * 37 - a simple juxtapositioning.



G.

[foolish_icarus]

of course this is serious...but still, also amusing. This is the most activity we've had in a while. My energy credits say that is what the perpetrator was aiming for, being able to watch our reactions in amusement.

[Jamski]

So, if our saves are compomised, and no longer safe, and if this "hacker" is still among us, and playing on one of the teams, how can we stop one team getting masses of info on the other factions, very probably without their other faction members even guessing what is happening?

We must immediately change to e-mailing the turns between teams, and stop posting them in the public forum. We have no alternative.

-Jam

[Maniac]

Thanks for the explanation johndmuller.

Jamski:

If the hacker is member of one of the factions, then not posting the turns in the public forum won't help. And in the beginning of the ACDG, we already discussed the option of neither posting turns in the private forum. Most of us decided against it as it would severely reduce the possibility for non-turn players to participate. Besides, even this wouldn't help if the hacker was the turn player himself...

[buster]

If the hacker is on one of the teams & has influence on game decisions said person will of course get a copy of the file in any case so mailing rather than posting changes nothing.

In any case the fact that moves are discussed in the team and that players usually give reasons for why they want to do what they want to do that makes sense with what is known from the info available to all is your best guideline.

Being able to open the file only gives access to knowing what the others are doing. The same could be obtained by having a member of a team feeding info to a member of another team. At least plans are not contained in the savegame.

There are more devastating cheats out there than that - so in general the teams should impose discipline on their members and ensure the game is played honest by coming down on members who suggest some sort of cheat be applied.

On this particular problem I believe the best measure would be that the teams pay notice if one of their members seems knowledgeable about what goes on outside his own faction to a degree where it cannot be explained by "clever conjecture" or " well educated guesses". Present writer excluded of course as I am inordinarily sharp.

Joking aside - I don't think we currently have a problem - Tassador after all came forward and to the best of what we know the passwords were not leaked on to other than Googlie & Tassador now resigned from Hive.

As said if the teams pay notice if someone appears to know too much and check him out if it happens I think we should be quite safe. After all as said "someone knowing things he shouldn't" could come from various sources - cracked/leaked passwords, secretly being member of more than one faction, getting info from a member/ spy in another faction etc. The problem is not new and neither are the signs to watch for.

To put in perspective at least SMAC does provide a decent level of security & I imagine only a person with the software needed and a decent measure of programming skill can find a match for a password and would need to do it for each seperate game. Civ III by comparison is pbem'ed pretty much on the hope the others won't cheat as the security is not really present at all. There anyone who desires can see opponent moves, there is no reload warning, there is variety of "savegame editors" readily available - you name it. At least with SMAC someone won't cheat much or little for long without it being evident and if team members are watching and decisions actually democratically made there is not much you can do in the way of cheating at all.

In the end the only real guarantee is that teams do not tolerate elements within them that do not play by the rules. If this is kept in - there will not be any problems - if some team is dishonest we have a mess anyway and already had from the start.

[Snowflake]

Ok I'm very naive at computer technology so this may sound very ignorant. But I was wondering if it is at all possible that for each turn posted people who downloaded it could be recorded by the administors. If there is this one person who has this knowledge I would be quite sure that he would want to use it. So if somebody has downloaded multiple times of multiple factions turns, we might be able to isolate him. (Of course I know that some people may have done the same thing in the earlier stage for the word file in game communication cheat. But this behavior should have stopped long ago since presumely all factions are communicating through other channels now.)

[buster]

The admins of this site should be able to find the username & ips of people who downloaded files.

However the person need only have downloaded the file once in that once you have cracked the password of one faction you can simply end the turn, save & crack the next.

[Snowflake]

Well I was thinking that if he is one of the ACDGers, then after he has got all the passwords working, he perhaps would want to get other factions' turns and check how they are doing. If he is one of the players who plays turns, then he'll have access to the next faction without having to download. But for all the other factions, he still has to download the turns if he wants to use that knowledge of passwords to gain actual benefit in the game right?

[buster]

Of course to keep up he will need to regularly download the file