[HN Gopher] Digital forgeries are hard
___________________________________________________________________
Digital forgeries are hard
Author : ingve
Score : 143 points
Date : 2024-03-14 09:26 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mjg59.dreamwidth.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mjg59.dreamwidth.org)
| bell-cot wrote:
| Reality: Casual forgery is pretty easy. Forgery that will stand
| up to expert examination is very hard. And impossible if you're a
| bungling incompetent, as this guy seems to be.
| nullc wrote:
| A thing to keep in mind is that many of these forgeries Wright
| has _successfully_ been using for a number of years. They
| fooled people! "If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid".
|
| One thing I've realized during the case is that the kind of
| scrutiny people apply when they get handed a document as
| "proof" is not the same as the scrutiny they'd apply if handed
| a document they know is fake and they simply need to find
| proof.
|
| In the former case people just tend to confirmation bias
| themselves, they check a few things and say "yep checks out".
| While in the latter case, they'll much more quickly say "well
| if it's authentic, then all the version numbers should check
| out, lemme go check those".
|
| The former kind of check is almost completely ineffective
| against an intentional forgery unless it was made by someone
| dramatically less competent that you. Validation for "proof"
| sake must use the second process of assuming it false and
| looking for the evidence of it.
|
| There is nothing fundamentally wrong with accepting a document
| on its face, but you shouldn't deceive yourself that you've
| validated something. If someone is giving you a document to
| prove something then you have to accept a serious possibility
| that it was fake, otherwise why bother looking at the document
| at all?
| Macha wrote:
| There's also been a few cases over the years of forged documents
| being spotted by changing MS Word font defaults:
|
| One example: https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/pakistan/calibri-
| controversy...
| gjvnq wrote:
| Skill issue.
|
| They could've easily used Times New Roman like their teachers
| probably instructed them. /hj
| hammock wrote:
| I'm reminded of the theory that the 2017 DNC email leak was
| forged to look like it had come from a Russian, when a deeper
| analysis suggested it had come via local thumb drive:
| https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2017/08/23/exclusive-n...
| pvg wrote:
| There is this theory of the Moebius. A twist in the fabric of
| space where time becomes a loop from which there is no escape.
| woah wrote:
| Imagine repeating the same day as a Hillary '16 campaign
| staffer over and over for eternity
| BoppreH wrote:
| I wonder why we don't have better (widely trusted and used)
| timestamping services. It has always been easy to prove that
| something happened _after_ a certain time: take a photo of today
| 's newspaper, mention stock prices, etc.
|
| But proving that an event happened _before_ a certain time, like
| in the article, is a lot harder. You can send someone an email
| through a trusted gateway, but people can only check by having
| access to that mailbox, or trusting the person who has access.
| And I know about PKI timestamping, but I 've never seen them used
| for legal cases, maybe because the complexity erodes trust.
|
| Are there any good solutions that would convince a non-technical
| judge?
|
| Edit: I remember _Twitter_ [1] being used for this purpose, but I
| don't know if today I'd trust a hash dropped there, given how
| much it's evolving and/or struggling.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26609183
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Don't know how convincing it'd be in court, but Open
| Timestamps[1], a free service that operates by publishing
| Merkle tree hashes to the Bitcoin ledger and can give you
| independently-verifiable proofs after a while, still exists
| even if it doesn't seem to be under active development. (I
| think Keybase tried something like that some time ago as well,
| they already had most of the parts in place, but then they
| decided to use their own something-or-other-coin and I stopped
| paying attention.)
|
| [1] https://opentimestamps.org/
| vintermann wrote:
| A good example of using bitcoin for something that was
| entirely possible with regular old public key cryptography.
| Matthew Richardson's Stamper has been running since 1995.
| sp1rit wrote:
| > Are there any good solutions that would convince a non-
| technical judge?
|
| I feel like the best you can do is either to publish a
| cryptographically secure hash or to publish something encrypted
| and share the key/password when you want to reveal the secret.
| BoppreH wrote:
| But publish it where, though? It has to be:
|
| - Publicly accessible.
|
| - Timestamped.
|
| - Immutable (or at least with edits marked as such).
|
| - Widely trusted (or too big to be bribed in small cases,
| e.g., Google).
|
| - And keep those features for many years.
|
| Twitter was surprisingly good at that in the past, but no
| more. Blockchains, as mentioned in other comments, give
| excellent immutability; but the field is such a minefield
| that I'd struggle to find a trustworthy blockchain explorer.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Take out a personal ad in a newspaper.
| __jonas wrote:
| It's funny given the context of this case that this would
| be one of the rare times when using a blockchain would have
| actually been useful
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Publish a document hash in the newspaper classifieds. Media
| should still be getting permanently archived by National
| Archive or Internet Archive.
| fragmede wrote:
| Why would you trust only one Blockchain explorer? You'd
| trust the blockchain by using several explorers, and by
| confirming that they all agree on the same value, to
| assuage any fears you have about any one particular
| blockchain explorer lying to you. Write your own, even, if
| your level of confidence needs to be that high.
| nullc wrote:
| > Are there any good solutions that would convince a non-
| technical judge?
|
| Judges can be aided by expert reports.
|
| And not all judges are non-technical.
|
| The fact that you _can_ defend your documents with timestamps
| is often enough: the other side won 't challenge them knowing
| that they are likely to lose the challenge.
| upofadown wrote:
| If you can prove the existence of the encrypted thing before
| some point in time than you could prove the existence of the
| unencrypted thing before some point in time.
|
| There isn't any way to do this without one or more trusted
| third parties. Traditionally that would involve someone like
| a public notary or a lawyer.
|
| I was amused to find that there is a service that
| cryptographically timestamps things over email via PGP that
| has been running since 1995:
|
| * https://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper/stampinf.htm
| SmooL wrote:
| This is/could be a legitimate use of blockchain, e.g. see
| https://gwern.net/timestamping
| BoppreH wrote:
| Oh, there's a Gwern page about that. That's perfect, thanks
| for the link.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| For most purposes, mailing something to yourself for the
| postmark and keeping the envelope sealed would probably be
| adequate. It's possible to forge, but tricky enough.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| As far as I know, this is pretty much the gold standard.
|
| Note that you need to send First Class to get a postmark in
| the US - not standard Priority Mail.
| grkvlt wrote:
| you realise it is possible to mail _unsealed, open_
| envelopes, right? doesn 't seem that tricky...
| weinzierl wrote:
| There used to be a service that published your hashes in the
| New York Times. Satoshi must have known about it because it is
| mentioned in the Bitcoin paper.
| nullc wrote:
| Allow me to plug my co-defendant's project:
| https://opentimestamps.org/
| michaelt wrote:
| _> But proving that an event happened before a certain time,
| like in the article, is a lot harder._
|
| If you _know_ you 're going to have to prove it, there are
| loads of options. Absolutely loads.
|
| The issue is simply that _this guy 's a fraud_ so he's gotta
| come up with a story about why he didn't use any of them.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| _> Are there any good solutions that would convince a non-
| technical judge?_
|
| The judge in this case is actually very technical so that's not
| a problem.
|
| Regardless, the easiest and most direct way to timestamp
| something is to use the standard RFC 3161 timestamping servers.
| There are many, located in different countries and run by
| different people, and the format is straightforward and
| standardized. Support is built in to products like Acrobat. You
| can attach multiple timestamps from different sources to a
| single file. They are free. It can be explained to non-
| technical people in a not extreme amount of time, and courts /
| law firms in any country can easily find expert witnesses who
| can verify such timestamps and testify to the court as to their
| veracity.
|
| For emails there's also DKIM, which signs email including the
| date header. Again, plenty of people who can verify those
| signatures, so emailing something to someone else and then
| getting a copy of the raw email will do it (don't email to
| yourself, that skips the signing process).
|
| Disclosure: I took part in this trial as a witness and
| testified against Wright.
| sweetjuly wrote:
| Note that DKIM does not necessarily sign the message
| contents. [1] DKIM is only really (in a general sense)
| intended to provide cryptographic proof that the originating
| server is permitted to send it. If you need a non-reputable,
| dated message, you really should use time stamping servers.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail#
| Con...
| TillE wrote:
| Yeah it's odd to see a bunch of people proposing ideas for
| cryptographic timestamps (on the blockchain!) when anyone who
| has worked with digital signatures should know about RFC3161.
|
| Of course for verification it's important that the timestamp
| comes from a reputable CA and not some random server you set
| up.
| blipvert wrote:
| If only there was some sort of globally distributed,
| cryptographically verified database of some sort that could be
| used for this purpose ...
| fragmede wrote:
| We'd first have to admit that Bitcoin isn't a total scam and
| might actually be useful for something, and we can't have
| that now, can we?
| recursive wrote:
| We would need to admit no such thing. In fact, it's
| possible that it's simultaneously not a scam, not
| practically useful, and also suitable for this purpose.
|
| Stuff on the block chain has a problem asserting anything
| that's not on the block chain, which is what a lot of
| people want to use it for. In this case, it's a bitcoin
| solution to a bitcoin problem. It's all in-universe so to
| speak.
| alilleybrinker wrote:
| (Assuming this is the same case; I haven't been following Craig
| Wright closely)
|
| It looks like the case was very swiftly decided against Wright.
| Here's reporting from The Guardian about it today:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/14/australia...
| toyg wrote:
| I always wonder about people like Wright... how does such a
| brain work? Why would one invest so much of his life and
| reputation on brazen lies and forgeries? He's been caught so
| many times, surely nobody can take him seriously anymore, it's
| over, time to move on - but here he is, forging emails and
| logs, digging deeper and deeper, turning his life more and more
| into a farce. Why?
| Analemma_ wrote:
| There's pretty broad consensus that Craig Wright is a
| pathological liar. And I'm not using that as an idiom for
| "dishonest person", I mean it in the psychiatric term of art
| sense [0]: he probably has an actual compulsion to lie
| stemming from some kind of psychological damage, which
| doesn't stop even when he's caught red-handed (he just
| invents new even more outrageous lies, even when that's
| nakedly against his own self-interest). This is confirmed not
| just by all his behavior re: Bitcoin, but his own mother said
| at one point he has been like this his whole life. It's. In
| earlier days of Bitcoin it was causing actual problems, but
| these days everyone treats him as a carnival amusement and
| nothing more.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_lying
| bitnorbert wrote:
| A bunch of bitcoin developers are still facing lawsuits
| from him, and it still requires a ton of attention from
| them and is causing them anguish. He may not keep launching
| lawsuits against random community members, but one of them
| still has one appeal case and one separate lawsuit against
| him, for having been mean to him on Twitter.
|
| It's true that most people consider Wright a silly clown
| these days, but the chilling effect against Bitcoin
| development is hard to quantify and, I think, wholly real.
| This is why his latest loss makes today a good day.
| rideontime wrote:
| From watching the trial, it does seem to be an innate
| behavior for him, effortlessly spinning "plausible" stories
| to account for everything he's challenged on, that would
| sound convincing to somebody without the technical
| knowledge to understand what he's talking about.
| breck wrote:
| The active steps to disguise the truth are hard to
| understand. Maybe some sort of brain damage? Or maybe a
| pathological disorder that I don't understand.
|
| However, if I try to assume a good intent, here's what I come
| up with:
|
| CW knows he is not Satoshi and his case is laughable.
| However, by chance he happens to be in a unique position
| (relative to everyone else) where as long as he pushes his
| case, he keeps attention on the mystery of Satoshi . Maybe
| that is his goal all along, and his calculations show that he
| increases the odds of the true creator being revealed by
| pushing his false claims.
|
| I mean, the anonymity of Satoshi is puzzling. BitCoin is the
| _only_ major modern invention with an anonymous creator,
| AFAIK. I guess the most bothering aspect of the whole thing
| is not that I don 't know who Satoshi is, it's that I know
| there are people out there who do know (maybe in the dozens,
| hundreds, or low thousands). It's annoying that there are
| state secrets like that. So if that is CW's intent behind all
| his puzzling immature actions, then there's an interesting
| argument to consider that his actions might have a positive
| ends.
| Canada wrote:
| Why? Set the chart to max:
| https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin-sv
| lolc wrote:
| Wow this guy is a prolific forger! Not knowing the details of the
| case, doesn't he risk getting a book thrown at him for
| introducing forged evidence?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Yes. He is at grave risk of the Crown Prosecution Service
| making an example of him, which could result in jail time.
| shmeeed wrote:
| No doubt he expects to be able to talk his way out of that.
| malux85 wrote:
| Holy smokes isn't forging evidence a crime?
|
| Even if it's hard to prove exactly that he did it, there's a
| strong motive and means and a lot of pretty shocking evidence of
| forgery here.
| bitnorbert wrote:
| He left court on a Friday, did the email forgery in the article
| over the weekend, and was back in court on Monday. Forging
| evidence is always bad, but doing it _during the trial_ in
| response to something he was cross-examined on? That has to be
| particularly bad.
| nullc wrote:
| Not just that, but he attempted to _plant_ the forgery in the
| mailbox of his former legal representation!
|
| Maybe that won't be treated as seriously as it should be
| because people don't realize that it very much could have
| worked!
| ryan-c wrote:
| This is about Faketoshi Notamoto, right?
|
| _click_
|
| Yup.
|
| This guy is a pathological forger and is _bad_ at it.
|
| Here's my write-up from when he got caught doing naughty things
| with ECDSA:
|
| https://rya.nc/sartre.html
|
| (as noted by another commenter, "pathological" is literal in this
| case)
| rwmj wrote:
| The weird thing is being bad at it hasn't stopped him. (That
| and there's some billionaire behind the whole thing, which
| probably helps.) This article was interesting:
| https://rorycellanjones.substack.com/p/the-battle-of-bitcoin
| ixwt wrote:
| Wouldn't it be trivially easy to prove that oneself is Satoshi
| Nakamoto? Just signing arbitrary messages with one of the many
| wallet addresses from the first Bitcoins mined? Assuming of
| course, that those early keys didn't end up like so many: on a
| hard drive, in a land fill.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| He claims he destroyed the keys while medicated after being
| released from hospital
| https://twitter.com/bitnorbert/status/1757745072974475270
| 1-6 wrote:
| Craig Wright sounds like a bad liar
| bitnorbert wrote:
| In my opinion, he's a conman, as in confidence man. His lies
| aren't high quality, but he tells them with great confidence,
| which sadly is appealing to many people. He can answer any
| accusation on the spot without hesitation. He's vague, so you
| kind of feel like what he just said contradicted something he
| said earlier, but most people's reaction is that they must have
| misunderstood him earlier. He's very good at technobabble; if
| you don't know that much about technical stuff, he can come off
| as highly knowledgeable. He will use emotion as necessary.
|
| Over the eight years he's been at this, he has built up a cult
| following of people who worship the ground he walks on and will
| defend him ferociously at every opportunity.
|
| Yes, he's a bad liar, but very few people can do what he does.
| nullc wrote:
| You likely haven't witnessed him in person. For subjects he is
| expecting his lies are delivered with perfect fluidity and
| almost messianic confidence. He easily slips into raw
| belligerence that absolutely shuts down most people.
|
| He is an expert at statements that brim with sound and fury but
| which signify nothing, and so although they covey some
| impression their content leaves nothing to falsify.
|
| He immediately deceives many people. Some of his approach is
| polarizing, particularly the technobabbling-- people either
| fall hard for him or see right through him-- but generally a
| conman only needs to fool some people, not everyone.
|
| The technobabbling even sometimes works on technical people,
| particularly when they go in pre-awed by him, they assume that
| misunderstandings are errors on their part.
|
| Like if you met Knuth and asked him a question and he replied
| with a bunch of jargon you've barely heard about but it doesn't
| really sound right... you're not going to suddenly start
| thinking he's a big fake, right? you're going to assume you're
| the clueless one.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Just Ask Craig Wright.
| reaperman wrote:
| This reminds me of a paper[0] whose thesis is _" We enumerate the
| requirements that a censorship-resistant system must satisfy to
| successfully mimic another protocol and conclude that
| "unobservability by imitation" is a fundamentally flawed
| approach."_ It relates to censorship-resistant communication
| systems such as SkypeMorph, StegoTorus, and CensorSpoofer which
| aim to evade censors' observations by imitating common protocols
| like Skype and HTTP.
|
| This is essentially "digital forgery" at the protocol level. I
| wonder if the thesis could be shown to be generalizable to most
| digital forgery, or even forgery in general.
|
| 0: https://people.cs.umass.edu/~amir/papers/parrot.pdf
| nullc wrote:
| This is a great point that hasn't been aired enough. I'm thrilled
| to see outsiders reading the expert reports-- which are
| themselves fascinating reading.
|
| I'm one of Wright's defendants and have spent the last several
| years of my life trapped in this involuntary puzzle hunt.
|
| Often people read the conclusions on the documents and say "man
| this guy Wright is a total idiot"-- and while I don't disagree
| with the sentiment, it's the wrong conclusion to draw from the
| documents.
|
| These debunks seem simple once they've been pointed out to you.
| But the problem that a forger has is that they must get
| EVERYTHING exactly right. The anti-forger, on the other hand,
| need only identify one solid flaw.
|
| Wright's stupidity wasn't so much in any particular error (okay,
| well a couple were kinda dumb: like backdating documents by
| robotically replacing all past tense with future tense, turning
| him into nostradumbass.)-- but the scale meant that it was
| inevitable the he would make errors.
|
| Unfortunately he's been learning and for the most part his later
| forgeries had a lot less metadata to go on. If he gets too many
| more tries he may be able to start producing unfalsifiable
| forgeries. I'm really homing the judgement is forceful enough to
| meaningfully shut him down.
| mjg59 wrote:
| Thanks! The quality of the expert witness statements is
| astonishing, and the sheer scale of the work carried out in a
| relatively short period of time is something I just can't
| imagine. Do you know if there's any likelihood of the
| opposition's expert witness statements (or Craig's remaining
| witness statements) being made public?
| nullc wrote:
| They'll be made public. They're also good, though I think
| you'll agree ours are more interesting-- as our side found
| close to a strict superset of issues.
|
| I think in particular the Lynch (one of Wright's expert)
| report on the LaTeX files is interesting because it took a
| different approach than Rosendahl -- so it wasn't as
| duplicative: Rosendahl tried using legacy tools against the
| files, Lynch used current tools the combination was
| particularly fatal to Wright because if only one approach had
| been used Wright would have claimed that the other approach
| would have produced results that supported his case.
|
| (Rosendahls' report itself is a great work in its own right,
| in spite of being a LaTeX user for >20 years I learned quite
| a few things from it).
|
| I wish we'd gotten access to Wright's 22 million lines of
| chatgpt traffic since September, that might have been
| particularly interesting! -- the abuse of LLM's in the case
| is itself something of public interest that sadly wasn't
| adequately ventilated in the trial because we weren't able to
| get the relevant records. But there were pretty good
| indications that Wright used ChatGPT directly to create
| forgeries, aid in the construction of other forgeries, and to
| pad out his witness statements in a bit of a volumetric
| attack.
|
| The Bitcoin legal defense fund has tried to get out most of
| what it could lawfully put out, -- skipping a few things with
| privacy issues-- but once the trial started the priority
| shifted to managing the case.
|
| The default openness of the US courts may well have been the
| real hero in all this: documents and statements made public
| in the kleiman case boxed wright in from every angle. Its
| important that materials from this case are made public
| because it may not, unfortunately, be the last we hear from
| wright. Even where the US case didn't make some things
| public, it make their existence public which in some cases
| enabled us to obtain them: e.g. we were able to get all of
| Gavin's communications with Satoshi which had previously been
| provided to Wright and whose existence Wright tried
| desperately and ultimately unsuccessfully to deny.
|
| The UK court openness is less by default, but the parties
| have a substantial ability to publish things-- allowing the
| parties to get things much closer to US practices.
| rideontime wrote:
| Did you get to see any of Ramona's box of last-minute
| handwritten evidence? While I'm glad you didn't have to deal
| with it and drag things out further, I'd love to see more
| entertainingly obvious forgeries, like the notepad dated '07
| that wasn't printed until 2012.
| nullc wrote:
| Yes. hehe. Mixed feelings on that. It's fun to dunk on his
| forgeries, but they all have risk.
|
| I very much did not enjoy having to read a large amount of
| handwritten nonsense on a short fuse during the trial... and
| in some sense he was successful with them in that he wasted
| an enormous amount of time that could have been spent on
| something else, an they likely won't weigh against him
| substantially if at all since they didn't get used.
| esafak wrote:
| A more serious case of this took place in Turkey two decades ago,
| and involved the jailing of a significant fraction of the
| military leadership. So it amounted to a judicial coup against
| the military. The son-in-law of one of the generals (Cetin Dogan)
| analyzed a piece of the evidence, a Word document ostensibly
| dated 2003, and proved that it contained anachronisms dating it
| to at least 2007.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledgehammer_(alleged_coup_pla...
| mcdonje wrote:
| Interesting article, but the headline seems dubious. What's the
| opposite of survivorship bias? Because it seems like the
| population of good forgeries would be hard to quantify.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-14 23:00 UTC)