Monday, September 18, 2006

Semaphore - earlier analysis is wrong (read this)

Earlier, a group of us reported seeing two unique concurrent streams coming from Semaphore. Apparently, this was not an accurate observation. Semaphore's broadcast is via Flash and when you load up the simulcast page, it sends your browser a flash object (*.swf) file within an HTML page. If you open another one, it should send you the same Flash object but may start playing it from a different reference point. If you take the time to analyze both streams, you will note that they are in fact the same.

This may also poke holes in the theory that Semaphore uses two or more rounds of encryption. It may be true but more likely that the rounds are linear rather than non-linear and generated on the fly.

Another topic that no one has mentioned before is the rotation of the glyphs. Some of them rotate clockwise and some rotate counter clockwise. Sometimes some go each way. I would be interested in any theories arising out of this.