Anja Drephal

This spring marked the 30th anniversary of the public uncovering of the so-called KGB Hack, bringing with it a number of new articles remembering the event and forging bridges to the present.

This spring marked the 30th anniversary of the public uncovering of the so-called KGB Hack, bringing with it a number of new articles remembering the event and forging bridges to the present. The 36C3 seems an excellent opportunity to take a look back at the instance of hacking which, even more so than previous events like the BTX and NASA Hacks, brought the CCC into the focus of the (West-)German public – and, additionally, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz) and the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst). This talk aims to focus on the uncovering of the KGB Hack, which began in 1986 when Clifford Stoll, a systems administrator at the University of California in Berkeley, noticed an intruder in his laboratory’s computer system – and, unlike other admins of the time, decided to do something about it. It took three more years of relentless investigation on Stoll’s part and laborious convincing of the authorities of the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany to trace back the intruder to a group of young men loosely connected to the CCC who worked with the KGB, selling information gained from breaking into US military computers to the Soviet Union. In March of 1989, the widely watched West-German television news program "ARD Im Brennpunkt" informed the public of the “biggest instance of espionage since the Guillaume affair”. It presented a new quality of high tech espionage, undertaken by “computer freaks”, somewhat shady-seeming young men connected to the Chaos Computer Club. The reporting on the KGB Hack had a tremendously negative effect on the public image of hackers in general and the CCC in particular. Now the “computer freaks” were no longer seen as benevolent geeks who pointed out flaws in computer systems - they were criminals, working with the Russians, harming their own country. Sounds familiar? It’s an image which has been lingering until today.

Used in cell phone technology, bluetooth devices, and WiFi, Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) is often said to have been invented in the early 1940s by none other than Hollywood actress and sex symbol Hedy Lamarr. This talk will present the undeniably entertaining history of a well-known actress moonlighting as a military inventor as well as give an overview of the 100-year-old history of frequency hopping and its past and present uses.

Imagine no WiFi, no cell phones, no bluetooth. (Everything’s better with bluetooth!) It is often said that we owe the convenience of all these modern technologies to Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr and her invention of Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) in the early 1940s. Do we? Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9, 1914, the daughter of an affluent Viennese family became famous at age 18 for starring naked and faking the first onscreen orgasm in history in the Czech-Austrian film “Ekstase” – fame which led to a successful Hollywood career after Hedwig Kiesler emigrated to the USA and renamed herself Hedy Lamarr. “The most beautiful woman in the world”, as director Max Reinhardt called her, starred in more than two dozen Hollywood movies over the course of twenty years, all the while being bored by the intellectual limitations her job offered. On the subject of what it takes to be a Hollywood sex symbol, she is quoted to have said “Any girl can look glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” Lamarr had always been interested in science and technology and wanted to help the United States' war effort during World War II by doing more than just using her fame and physical beauty to sell war bonds and entertaining the troops at the Hollywood Canteen. In her spare time, she thought about torpedoes: powerful, yet hard to control weapons which might hit their targets more precisely when guided by radio signals. Lamarr knew that the problem with radio signals was that they could easily be jammed by the enemy – and with her co-inventor, pianist and composer George Antheil, she developed a “Secret Communication System” based on the idea of having radio signals hop around frequencies in a seemingly random pattern, making it thereby hard to impossible to interfere with them. A patent was granted to Lamarr and Antheil, but the United States Navy dismissed the technology, in part due to the fact that it had been proposed by an actress and a composer. Lamarr's idea of frequency hopping remained untouched until the 1960s, when the Navy first used it in a buoy signaling submarine locations to airplanes during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the following decades, the military and private companies developed numerous technologies around the idea of frequency hopping, which is found in most digital devices communicating wirelessly today, be it via bluetooth, WiFi, or in cell phones. Hedy Lamarr's legacy, though, remained that of a beautiful Hollywood actress and sex symbol until recently. Only in 2014 were she and Antheil inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Admittedly, Lamarr was not the first person to think of frequency hopping as a method for making radio signals harder to intercept and jam: none other than Nikola Tesla was granted a U.S. patent in 1903 which does not use the words “frequency hopping”, but describes changing wireless frequencies to avoid interception of radio communication. During World War I, the German army used a primitive way of frequency hopping to stop the British listening in to their radio communication. It may be an overstatement, therefore, to say that without Hedy Lamarr there would be no bluetooth, no WiFi, no cell phones today. But she did invent a unique way of doing frequency hopping, and many recent patents in frequency hopping spread spectrum technology refer to the Lamarr-Antheil patent as the basis of the field. When it comes to Hedy Lamarr, although she resented not being credited for her scientific inventions for most of her life and instead being reduced to a beautiful face and body, she was after all a woman of her (sexist) time: during her later years, she desperately tried to save her looks through multiple plastic surgery, comically distorting her face to the point where she hardly left the house any more and could only be reached by phone. When, in 1997, her work was finally credited for the first time with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award, 82-year-old Hedy sent a recorded message: “In acknowledgement of your honoring me, I hope you feel good as well as I feel good about it, and it was not done in vain. Thank you.” Sources: Barton, Ruth. Hedy Lamarr: The most beautiful woman in film. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. Förster, Jochen, and Anthony Loder. Hedy Darling: das filmreife Leben der Hedy Lamarr. Hollenstedt: Ankerherz Verlag, 2012. Lamarr, Hedy. Ecstasy and me: my life as a woman. New York: Bartholomew House, 1967. Miessner, Benjamin Franklin. Radiodynamics: The wireless control of torpedoes and other mechanisms. London: Crosby, Lockwood & Son, 1917. Rhodes, Richard. Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. New York: Doubleday, 2011. Robbins, Trina. Hedy Lamarr and a secret communication system. Mankato, Minn.: Capstone Press, 2007. [graphic novel aimed at middle school students] Shearer, Stephen Michael. Beautiful: The life of Hedy Lamarr. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2010. Simons, Marvin K., et. al. Spread Spectrum Communications Handbook. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002.

During World War I, homing pigeons were used to carry messages and take photographs over enemy territory. Today, experiments are being conducted to remote-control insects for similar purposes. This talk intends to give an overview of 100 years of living drones, speculate on future developments in the field, and question the ethical implications of the practice.

Long before man-made aerial vehicles were invented and perfected, pigeons have been employed to carry messages over long distances. Their homing instinct, the ability to find their way back to their home loft from as far as 1,000 miles away, has been known and used by mankind since ancient times. While regular pigeon post had been established since the Middle Ages, it was during World War I that pigeons were used extensively for military purposes: radio communication was still crude and unreliable, but pigeons were fast and dependable means of delivering messages from behind enemy lines. With the advancement of photography, they were even employed as aerial surveillance drones, equipped with small automatic cameras. Although the US and British armies disbanded their pigeon sections in the 1950s, carrier pigeons are being used for communication purposes until today. Taking the idea of connecting flying animals with communication technology one step further, as of 2014, experiments are being conducted in wiring and remote-controlling moths, effectively turning them into biobots to be used for search and rescue missions – and possibly for military and surveillance purposes?

The use of encryption to secure sensitive data from unauthorized eyes is as old as human communication itself. Before the relatively new method of computerized encryption software converting data into a format unintelligible to anyone lacking the necessary key for its decryption, for a long time there was pen and paper and the human brain doing quite a bit of work. Up until the 20th century encryption had to be done literally by hand, to then be transmitted in paper form, via telegraphy or radio. In this context, encryption of data has always been of special importance during times of political conflict and war; subsequently, it saw its major developments during those times in history. This talk will examine and explain common hand encryption methods still employed today using the example of one very successful Soviet espionage group operating in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s: the spy ring centered around Richard Sorge, codenamed “Ramsay”.

In the summer of 1938, the Japanese Secret Police started to notice mysterious radio transmissions emanating from somewhere in the Tokyo area. These transmissions, consisting of seemingly meaningless groups of digits, seemed to be directed towards the Asian mainland; neither the Secret Police nor the Japanese Communications Ministry and the Communications Bureau of the Governor General of Korea were able to pinpoint the where and from more precisely. It wasn't until 1941 that Japanese authorities uncovered the full scope and meaning of these messages – by accident and at first disbelieving what they had unearthed. The seemingly gibberish radio transmissions did indeed emanate from the heart of Tokyo and, as it turned out, were received in Vladivostok and passed on to Moscow, to be presented to Stalin himself. Decrypted, they contained vital information about secret German and Japanese plans, even the date of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. This information had been gathered by Richard Sorge, a German citizen with a colorful personality who had infiltrated the small German community in Japan under the guise of a journalist and even gained the friendship and trust of the German ambassador, giving him access to any information available inside the embassy of Japan's ally. In Japan since 1933, Sorge had built a spy ring around a small group of confidantes: a Japanese journalist with connections to powerful Japanese political circles, a French-Yugoslav communist, and a German radio technician, Max Clausen. Clausen's technical knowledge proved vital for the group's success: he was able to build a transmitter and receiver capable of reaching up to 4,000 km from scratch, using parts available in Tokyo shops without raising suspicion. His radio station was fully portable in a large briefcase and assembled in under 10 minutes. The dispatches transmitted to the Soviet Union by Sorge's group were written in English and then converted into digits using a straddling checkerboard and, to scramble the content even more, a book cipher, using pages from a statistical yearbook as the key. The Japanese authorities were not able to decipher the messages, Sorge's encryption method remained unbroken until Max Clausen explained it himself after his arrest in 1941. The historical importance of Sorge's espionage material remains a controversial issue among historians; some call him the greatest spy of all times, some argue that since Stalin did not trust his information, Sorge had little influence on the outcome of World War II. Instead of trying to settle this argument, my talk will examine the technical aspects of Sorge's work in Japan: I will describe the DIY radio station used to wirelessly transmit his dispatches over thousands of kilometers and show how these dispatches were manually encrypted using nothing but a pen, paper, and a book – suggesting that this method is still valid today, offering low-tech ways of concealing information, be it private or politically delicate material.