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DARPA
The $50,000 DARPA Shredder Challenge calls on participants to reconstruct handwritten messages that have been shredded beyond recognition, including this one.
DARPA's latest tech challenge is offering $50,000 for a task worthy of secret agents: piecing together messages that have been shredded into thousands of bits.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon think tank that previously brought you multimillion-dollar robo-car races and a nationwide hunt for red balloons, put five ripped-up puzzles online today to kick off its Shredder Challenge. If someone wins, and I'm betting that someone will, that would be good news and bad news for the Defense Department — and for folks like you and me.
"The goal is to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by our warfighters operating in war zones, but might also create vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected through our own shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community," DARPA said in its contest announcement.
Here's how the contest works: Participants register via the Shredder Challenge website, and then download five bunches of files that are essentially screenshots of shredded-up documents, plus instructions. They'll have to figure out how to put the documents back together, either by using computer analysis or by matching up itty-bitty pieces of printouts. Then they'll have to send DARPA an email with scans of the completed puzzles, the answers to questions about each puzzle ... and an explanation of the reasoning process that led to the solution.
Each of the puzzles carries a point value, and an online leader board will track the scores of the top contestants. DARPA will announce the winner and the amount of the prize awarded on Dec. 5, based on the points earned as well as the time stamps for submissions.
Hundreds sign up
"We are all pretty excited about this one," Dan Kaufman, director of the Information Innovation Office, told me in an email. So are puzzle fans: Soon after the competition opened, DARPA warned in a Twitter update that, "due to interest in the Shredder Challenge, there may be a delay accessing" the puzzle website. The Web traffic jam eased once DARPA beefed up its bandwidth.
Kaufman said this afternoon that "registrations were at 240 when I last checked, and not slowing down."
When I spoke with Kaufman, he said no one had yet submitted an entry. He couldn't predict whether it would take hours or days for puzzle sleuths to submit solutions. That's what makes the exercise interesting.
Kaufman's a veteran of 2009's Red Balloon Challenge, which asked participants to figure out the locations of 10 red balloons scattered around the country. He recalled that there was similar uncertainty about the outcome back then: "We were torn between 'It will never be solved' and 'Somebody's gotta solve this.'"
It turned out that researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab figured out the locations in just under nine hours, winning $40,000 in the process. A research paper published this week in the journal Science laid out the MIT team's winning strategy: a system of "recursive incentives" that promised payoffs for those who discovered the balloons, as well as those who recruited the discoverers.
MIT's Alexander Pentland and his colleagues said the recursive-reward arrangement could be used for life-and-death searches — for example, to look for a missing child, a criminal at large or the survivors of a natural disaster.
Good news, bad news
Kaufman told me that the winner of the Shredder Challenge may well use a method that DARPA's own researchers haven't thought of. Such methods could be used to read documents that have been shredded by the bad guys, such as al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan. "Currently, this process is much too slow and too labor-intensive, particularly if the documents are hand-written," Kaufman said in a news release. "We are looking to the Shredder Challenge to generate some leap-ahead thinking in this area."
Better message-demangling methods also could be used by bad guys to reconstruct financial statements, credit card reports and other sensitive documents that consumers thought had been safely disposed of.
"I'm concerned about the privacy implications," my colleague at msnbc.com's Red Tape Chronicles, Bob Sullivan, told me today.
Kaufman acknowledged that the contest's outcome might make you feel less secure about what happens to their shredded documents. But if that's the case, it's better to know that up front instead of burying your head in the sand. "I would say the 'ostrich defense' is not a good one," he told me.
Who knows? Maybe the first thing to come out of DARPA's latest challenge will be a rush to buy shredders that grind paper into powder. What do you think? Weigh in with your comments below.
Other challenges from DARPA:
- 2005: Stanford robo-car wins $2 million desert road race
- 2007: Driverless SUV wins $2 million Urban Challenge
- 2009: Balloon hunt nets $40,000 for MIT-led team
- 2011: DARPA wants to recycle space junk into satellites
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Leave a Comment:
I think that if we shredded stuff like paper twice we wouldn't have to worry about the possibility that someone could piece it back together.
I think this is very interesting. i think it will be very hard to decipher the content when it is shreded but never say never.
I think its good that there testing it to make sure it works because there could be a lot of people that could reform documents that are important and use it against someone.
There are multiple things you could do to rid of the documents.
1. Separate all the pieces in different places all over the world. Big hunt there.
2. Burn them.
3. Burn some of them and throw away the rest.
4. Burn some, stuff some down to toilet, and put the other in the trash,
5. ....a lot more. Most effective would be 2. BURN THEM!
i can do this easy
Shred then burn.
yah. this. fire. the end. :)
Ok, re: my earlier post - it's actually a really good idea for the military, cia, etc... because they can boost the security of their sensitive documents before they're even written. That way, cheap shredders can be used but still with high security. Here's an example of a secured document:
starts here
This is secret information that I don't want anybody to know. I hope nobody unshreds my document. If anybody finds this out, I'll be indicted.
Here is some extra text to confound unshredding, this is just a bunch of extra words to go on the paper to make it harder to solve the puzzle, maybe with some visual patterns too, preprinted on all the paper stock in the office or built in to the wordprocessor. What are the optimal words to prevent unshredding? If only we had a way to test different combinations of words or patterns against the unshredding methods invented by the smartest people in the country.
Hmm. How do we find and motivate the smartest people in the country? That's a hard task. Let's ask smart people how to do find smart people by offering them money to find a bunch of red balloons. (Turns out you use incentives, which is pretty damn funny, in a recursive kind of way. )
Now that we've found a way to find the smart people - money and competition - let's get them to make the test cases we can use to test our extra anti-unshredding words, which is, in these example, these words right here.
ends here
Quit getting paranoid: You should have learned your lesson over twenty years ago. I did. They use to in Manhattan New York, steal Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis panties from her home's dumpster. I don't even shred. I urinate on my trash and let the maggots devour it. The tinkle trick works, as do other antidotes, like used kitty litter. Your worried about codes? Your barber could be taking samples of your locks of hair, and find drugs and the big code: DNA. One can create codes from the simplest of things, like Goldilocks and The Three Bears, as found in WWII. Thee important thing is we have "Scrambler" in our arsenal and false records of all Americans in The Pentagon, in case we were ever attacked and succumbed to the enemy, our records are like germ warfare, to cease thee onslaught of intruders and give them AIDS or Smallpox. Example: you went to the dentist for an infection, it's in hospital records, but The Pentagon computer or data claims you didn't get amoxicillin, but you got incurable gonorrhea, and stay the hell away from you. It might not be Smallpox for global decimation, but leprosy they might booby trap with, and we're all losers.
Thee important thing to remember in messages of war, is there is the plan. The contingency plan, and the diversion. All handled by Scrambler. Your secrets are safe. Even ask baby bear. Now where are those panties? Happy President's Day? No one is going down in history.
Crap! I just decoded the message ... and it says I have to pay $49,999.99 tax on the award ; (
The first one looks pretty easy, align the red "margins" pieces....then align the pieces of text by themselves...whoever wrote this appears to have skipped every other blue line...all the blamk pieces aren't really needed.
It would take some programming sophistication to devise an algorithm that can identify wether lines are blue or red....that only text is black...a blend of OCR scanner algorithms (Optical Character Recognition) might help to identify text elements that can then be arranged. It would probably be faster than an algorithm identifying individual breaks or features in pieces.
Just for raw manual software in Paint or Photoshop....one would have to select and outline each piece, save it to a new image or use image hotspots to separate them in a growing pieces image file in another format. Mapped hotspots might be easier to pick up and move around...since no tool is yet available to click and drag each individual piece with a 90 degree rotate option, but there must be a way to do that.
Otherwise print it out, get some scissors, and have fun.
Important documents are burned and the ashes scrambled.
Why do they scramble the ashes? :-)
When your shredder is half full, empty the contents into your kitchen trash. Do not throw out until you have placed in lot of kitchen trahs. Leftovers, scrap, you get the idea. No one will be able to be able to reconstruct what you have shredded. And shred everything with your name of address on it; bills, envelopes, solicitations, junk mail (it will have your address on it). Shred a few coupons or somithing and mix together. That usually is sufficient.
God bless America.
Not sure why I misspelled something in the above post.
Same finger, other hand. Whoops. Sorry.
another waste of my tax dollars.To secure shredded documents they need to be burned to create heat that can be utilized to generate electricty
I'm reading these comments, but it doesn't sound like DARPA is trying to figure out the best way to destroy documents. I think they have some shredded documents that they'd like to have put back together.. maybe something shredded that they found from bin Laden's hideout?
What even happened in the Ricky McCormick case? Did the FBI ever decipher his coded notes.
I think it was the truck driver who did him in just to rob him of his spare of the payoff.