There’s an embedded archive file called all.7z which contains thousands of additional emails and files.
The 7zip archiver in which this is stored uses 256 bit AES encryption. It’s a tough nut to crack.
“FOIA” chose this most likely because there are no effective tools for 7zip, while there seem to be many for standard .zip and .RAR files.
From their website: http://www.7-zip.org/7z.html
“7-Zip also supports encryption with AES-256 algorithm. This algorithm uses cipher key with length of 256 bits. To create that key 7-Zip uses derivation function based on SHA-256 hash algorithm. A key derivation function produces a derived key from text password defined by user. For increasing the cost of exhaustive search for passwords 7-Zip uses big number of iterations to produce cipher key from text password.”
The password can be 2047 or 8191 characters long, depending on your operating system.
I’m doubtful this password will be cracked anytime soon, maybe DoD could do it. Chances are that “FOIA” chose a very long password, that could take years to crack by a brute force attack.
“FOIA” is holding this in reserve, making it known that it is there, ready to pull the firing pin. I expect we’ll see it sooner than later as the reaction so far from RC and the Team is continued arrogance.
Julian Williams in Wales has an interesting take:
Maybe the passphrase is so complex to be uncrackable; is that possible? Surely after having sat on this material for two years FOIA would have made a decision how he is going to play this, and it just makes no sense to put most of the material behind a crackable passphrase.
But supposing he then sent the passphrase to Phil Jones and M Mann with a threat; Resign now, get the hell out, otherwise this passphrase goes online to the general public. That is a strategy that might push FOIA’s enemies out without completely disgracing the “scientific community”
Just another way of looking at what might motivate FOIA.
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Since you need long password, it may be a phrase or quote related to climate change. Could be something in the original leak two years ago.
Fascinating speculation.
One aspect I’ve not seen discussed is whether FOIA might be not an individual leaker but a government agency, say from India or China, working with data hacked or purchased through espionage channels.
Given that the CAGW issue potentially involves tectonic geopolitical shifts and trillions of dollars in economic value, we ought to consider what the interests of various governments may be in this.
Thanks to everyone for the interesting comments.
Ken in North Dakota
There’s a free program 7za.exe which creates and unpacks .7z files. I use it daily for backing up.
You can download it from my site http://australianpracticesoftware.com using a link in the lower left corner. The downloaded file 7za.ex needs an extra e added to the extension. Run 7za to see commands at a command prompt line. You will need to run 7za E (filename) to extract.
The filenames seem to be Unix timestamps (seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970) like in the first batch.
The first one is
636048969 = Mon, 26 Feb 1990 16:16:09 GMT
which is an offlier (perhaps a placeholder, server test mail or something like that).
The next one is
826300921 = Fri, 08 Mar 1996 16:02:01 GMT
and from then on the stamps are spread somewhat continuously until the last one,
1258124051 = Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:54:11 GMT.
Interestingly, the the oldest email of the first batch is 0826209667.txt whose stamp resolves to
826209667 = Thu, 07 Mar 1996 14:41:07 GMT
which is older than the oldest in this encrypted batch. That could imply that it is not a superset containing already released emails. But matching filenames and sizes to released ones can confirm if this is true.
Perhaps my post above wasn’t clear. G. Karst has posted the passphrase (a good guess?) to the All.7z file. A miracle has happened
I’m still extracting so can’t see content – yet.
Just because the file we see is 7z doesn’t mean the contents are. You can 7z a crypto file or several. My SWAG is that there are several files inside each with their own crypto maybe even totally different ones like truecrypt.
I use truecrypt for my work and home so I’m not too familiar with 7z but 256 isn’t that much but AES with 8k+ chars to work at ….. well hope those quantum computers come online soon. Which brings me to an interesting thought. As Moore’s law continues the time for even that much crypto to remain unbroken is finite. That has got to weigh on the minds of those involved.
“Please not while I’m alive” is a phrase I’m sure is being muttered by certain individuals.
Do you remember how long it took the MSM to absorb the original emails? At least 6 to 8 weeks. And then the denials …
It wasn’t until the general public were ridiculing the press that the MSM starting to come clean. I wonder what will happen this time? It will be interesting to watch.
Looked for a few files from 2009 batch and found none.
Of course, it would be stupid of FOIA to leave them in the encrypted file, as it would make a cracking effort a lot easier when there is exact, known result data to compare to.
crosspatch says:
November 22, 2011 at 7:19 pm “8191 or 8192?”
You probably noticed that 8192 = 2^13
I’m still surprised that no one has yet completed the task of saving the MIME-encoded files from the emails. Many emails have them embedded in the text.
In 7z help file under ‘Format’ it reads,
Here is an estimate of the time required for an exhaustive password search attack, when the password is a random sequence of lowercase Latin letters.
We suppose that one user can check 10 passwords per second and an organization with a budget of about $1 billion can check 10 billion passwords per second. We also suppose that the processor in use doubles its performance every two years; so, each additional Latin letter of a long password adds about 9 years to an exhaustive key search attack.
The result is this estimate of the time to succeed in an attack:
Password Length Single User Attack Organization Attack
1 2 s 1 s
2 1 min 1 s
3 30 min 1 s
4 12 hours 1 s
5 14 days 1 s
6 1 year 1 s
7 10 years 1 s
8 19 years 20 s
9 26 years 9 min
10 37 years 4 hours
11 46 years 4 days
12 55 years 4 months
13 64 years 4 years
14 73 years 13 years
15 82 years 22 years
16 91 years 31 years
17 100 years 40 years
It’s probably locked away in the ocean with all that missing heat.
Oh, and here’s an online tool for converting UNIX timestamps to human-readable date and time:
http://www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm
I’m delighted, but before anyone starts up, It WAS logical, but a guess, none the same. I wonder if this upsets FOIA’s masterplan OR did he plan on somebody guessing the key. Wheels within wheels. Please try not to involve me in any conspiracy theories.GK
crosspatch says (November 22, 2011 at 6:19 pm):
> “Option3 ?”
> Insurance against the person controlling the files being arrested or otherwise forcibly silenced.
> The key would be in the hands of a third party with instructions to post it should anything happen
> to the person controlling the file release.
> Maybe life insurance.
I think that crosspatch is probably right. Foia is probably afraid for his life, so he is making sure that The Team has an interest in keeping him alive, rather than wanting him dead. That would explain why he’s publicly promised that he will not release the rest of the emails.
Unfortunately, that probably also means we’ll never know what’s in that archive — unless The Team is stupid enough to bump off Foia anyhow.
Take ALL the time you need …
.
G. Karst says: November 22, 2011 at 8:04 pm
If you really did bust it, the key was not only logical, but it is a little too obvious.
It was meant to be opened.
GK & others: The suggested phrase was incorrect. Beware of trolls.
I think Julian Williams is dreaming. It is not productive to play the maybe or what if maybe game. I think it unwise to release to much all at once anyway. The damage to science was done years ago. The damage to these boys and they are boys acting badly, will ultimately be of their own making.
I hope your right. I may have caused a premature discharge. No matter, full disclosure is all that really matters… isn’t it? GK
Releasing an encrypted file of emails is something the media can understand and people love a mystery. This will keep it in the media for days if not weeks. Very clever of FOIA.
Intel is showing off a 1 TFLOPs Co-processor that you can add to your computer if you have a spare PCIe slot.
This has the equivalent computing power that 17 cabinets full of racks of computers had in about 1997. Something like this sure could help crack the encryption.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-knights-corner-mic-co-processor,news-37030.html
Ooops, I mis-stated the computing power compared to 1997. Its 72 cabinets, not 17.
I would have used the first 256 chars of the first email in the corpus as a password…
A thought struck me. Maybe the pass phrase is in the readme.txt file we can read. The first part before ‘/// The IPCC Process ///’ is about 800 characters long, or 6400 bits, which would make a dandy password!
Also, it could be that the 5K readable emails are the last of the CRU batch, and the encrypted files are perhaps from another source that as yet does not realize it has been compromised. My first suspicion for a new source would be the IPCC servers. If FOIA.org is really good, it could also be from, say, Jim Hansen’s GISS operation or how about Michael Mann’s department servers! I know that there has been no evidence that servers other than UEA’s have been attacked, but one can think out loud…