US Cyber Command's code has been cracked

David Heath
Friday, 09 July 2010 14:12

Business IT - Security

The newly formed United States Cyber Command might actually have an understanding of security, and a sense of humour as well.

Over the past few days, the Internet has been awash with reports of an intriguing secret code embedded in the logo of the United States Cyber Command.

The logo clearly shows a string of characters on the inner gold ring surrounding the usual eagle-based motif.

For those of poor eyesight, the characters are:

9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a

Let's apply some simple analysis before we reveal the secret.

Firstly, it's almost certainly a hexadecimal string – there are digits 0 - 9 and letters a – f only.  Breaking it into 2-byte pairs gives us:

9e c4 c1 29 49 a4 f3 14 74 f2 99 05 8c e2 b2 2a

An inspection of which suggests a very low likelihood of a simple character translation to plain text.

What else do we know?  There are 32 bytes in the string and this is a very common length for a hash value.