Cryptographic challenge: crack a “numbers station.” These mysterious shortwave broadcasts consist of a monotone human voice endlessly reading a series of numbers. There’s been some thought that these are a way for intelligence agencies to communicate with agents in the field, but no one’s sure. Reputedly, a civilian has never decrypted a numbers station message. Reputedly, the NSA has.

The Numbers Station Crack

Challenge is inspired by the RSA Laboratories Secret Key challenges which are designed to demonstrate the weakness of short key

lengths in commercial cryptography applications.

With the advances in networking that are available to everyone, an unprecedented amount of processor power can be rallied to crack

mathematical problems. Previously, only Governments that could afford Cray Supercomputers has access to this type of computational

power, and in the case of Cray the American Government forbade the export of such machines, effectively making them unavailable to

the rest of the world. Now with client based network cracking, almost any brute force cryptanalytic attack can be mounted with a more

than reasonable chance of quick success. Spectacular cracks have already been successfully mounted on problems that seemed

insurmountable only a few years ago. This can be done, the problem is, how can it be done? You are free to use any methods that you

can devise, using whatever you have at your disposal.