Unpacking the alleged Assange-Manning password hacking conspiracy:
Share to twitterJulian Assange is accused of working with Chelsea Manning to crack a Windows password. The government offered detail on how just how it claims the pair did it.The U.S. government has disclosed more of its case against WikiLeaks cofounder Julian Assange. It hinges on a claim he and Chelsea Manning worked together to crack a password for a computer storing sensitive government files.
The alleged conspiracy to crack the password took place in March 2010, two months after she'd walked out of the Iraq base with classified war reports from Iraq and Afghanistan. She was later convicted and served seven years in jail for downloading tens of thousands U.S. military documents and diplomatic cables.The reason any password had to be cracked in the first place was the use of what's known as a"hash.
"In computing terms we call this a time/memory trade-off. Rather than spend time on a task, we pre-calculate parts of it and store them somewhere, essentially trading time for memory," says Tom Wyatt, senior penetration tester at cybersecurity provider Bulletproof."These tables can be calculated or downloaded from various online sources, and it simply boils down to paying for storage for it all; even in 2010 this was fairly cheap and entirely possible.
It's alleged Manning passed what she thought was a hash value to Assange. The Wikileaks chief then said he would pass it on to a specialist in cracking, according to chats over the Jabber encrypted communications app, as provided in the affidavit. But, as per the investigators' claims, there was some confusion: Manning said she wasn't even sure what she handed to Assange was the hash value they wanted.
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