1903 Hacker / Phreaker: Hacking a "secure" wireless communication channel

“My other hobby, also discovered at an early age, was practical magic (tricks). Having learned how this or that trick works, I worked it out many times until I reached perfection. To some extent, it was through tricks that I discovered the pleasure of gaining secret knowledge. ” Kevin Mitnick

“Manage the adversary's sensory perception” in order to “confuse, delay, inhibit, or misdirect [his] actions” DARPA`s project “Battlefield Illusion” .

As part of the training of young authors Habra in the category "Sauron" a second nominee appeared. Let me introduce - Trephs (Lesha), he did most of the translation work from English (so with questions about the translation to it).
This time we decided to cover the topic, in my opinion, quite worthy of Habr, namely the history of the first hacking of the information system, about which I already mentioned in passing in the post “History of hacker hacks of information systems (1903-1971)” .
It is worth mentioning that the hacking had an exclusively “trolling” character.

The Maskelines are still a little family. The grandfather-astronomer studied Venus and immortalized the Meskelin family in that the crater on the Moon was named after him, the dad of the hero of the text below, John Maskelin , invented a paid toilet-booth and other tricks, and his son, Jasper Maskelin drove Hitler by the nose (or and Churchill) and was a real combat magician illusionist, "hid" Alexandria harbor, conjured a German cruiser "Admiral Count Spee" and a bunch of "inflatable" tanks, as well as helping prisoners with escapes.
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Read about how Neville Maskelin hacked Marconi with his “super-protected” radio read under the cut.


More than a century ago, one of the first hackers in the world used Morse code hacking to thwart a public demonstration of the wireless telegraph of Marconi.

June evening of 1903 in the famous lecture theater of the Royal Institute of London silence reigned. In front of the crowd, physicist John Ambrose Fleming set up a mysterious device, intending to demonstrate a new miracle of technology: a wireless communication system for sending messages over long distances. The system was developed by the Italian pioneer of radio engineering - Guglielmo Marconi. The goal was for the first time to publicly show that Morse messages can be sent wirelessly over long distances. At a distance of 300 miles, Marconi prepared to send a signal to London from the station on the top of a mountain in Poldhu, Cornwall, United Kingdom.



But before the demonstration could begin, the unit in the audience began to print a message. At first he used the same word over and over. Then it turned into a joking verse, accusing Marconi of puffing up the public. Their demonstration hacked, and this is a hundred years before the current trouble on the Internet. Who did the hack at the Royal Institute? How did sassy posts get here and why?

It all began in 1887, when Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of electromagnetic waves, predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865.
By unloading the capacitor into two separate electrodes, Hertz ionized the air in between, creating a spark. Surprisingly, another spark darted between the two electrodes by several meters: the electromagnetic wave from the first spark created an electric current between the second pair of electrodes. These were long and short bursts of energy — the “wave of Hertz” —they could be broadcast to replace the dots and dashes of Morse code. This is how the wireless telegraphy appeared, and Marconi and his company were at the forefront. Marconi said his wireless messages could be sent privately over vast distances. “I can customize my tools so that no other tool besides the similarly-tuned one can intercept my messages,” Marconi said in the London News St James Gazette in February 1903.

It soon became apparent that this June day, the affairs at the Royal Institute for Marconi and Fleming would not go smoothly. Minutes before Fleming was supposed to receive Morse code messages from Marconi from Cornwall, the silence was broken by a rhythmic ticking noise popping from the copper projection lamp that was used to display the narrator’s slides. For untrained listeners, it was like the sound of a flickering projector. But Arthur Block, Fleming's assistant, quickly recognized the sound of typing a message in Morse code. Someone, Block decided, gave powerful wireless impulses to the theater and they were strong enough to interfere with the electric arc of the discharge lamp of the projector.

Deciphering the message in his mind, Blok realized that it communicated one joking word, again and again, “Nonsense.” Looking at the output of a nearby Morse message printer, he confirmed this guess. Then a more personal message came to the Morse receiver, making fun of Marconi * literally *: “One Italian guy had a big crush on the public” (original: “There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily”). This was followed by rude epithets and relevant lines from Shakespeare.

The battle flow ended a moment before the Marconi signals from Poldhu arrived. The demonstration continued, but irreparable damage was caused to it: if someone could interfere with the frequency of the wireless connection in this way, the system was obviously not as safe as Marconi had stated. And apparently it was possible to eavesdrop and private messages.

For Marconi it was, at least, very disappointing, but he did not answer directly to insults in the audience. He did not want to deal with skeptics and incredulous people and he had a convenient "excuse": "I will not demonstrate the system to those who do not trust its work." Be that as it may, Fleming sent a letter indignantly to the London Times. He called this hack "hooliganism in the field of science" and "a crime against the traditions of the Royal Institute". He asked readers to help him find the culprit.

He did not have to wait long. Four days later, a joyful letter concerning the hack was printed in The Times. He wrote it justified his actions in terms of demonstrating holes in security that he revealed for the common good. The author was Nevil Maskelin, a mustache 39-year-old British illusionist, anti-spiritist and inventor. Maskelin was a native of an inventive family - his father invented locks that opened if a coin was dropped into them and used these locks for pay toilets, and his ancestor was a famous astronomer . Maskelin was self-taught and was fascinated by wireless technology. He used Morse code in tricks with "reading thoughts" to secretly talk with an assistant. He developed a method of using a spark transmitter to remotely ignite gunpowder. In 1900, Maskelin sent wireless communications between the ground station and a balloon, which is 10 miles away. But, as the author of the Wireless book, Sanguk Khong, correctly noted, his ambitions were tainted by Marconi's patents, and Maskelin held a grudge against Italian. Soon, however, Maskelin was given a chance to take revenge.

Most of all, Marconi technology has suffered from the wired telegraphy industry. Telegraph companies owned expensive cable stations on the sea and on land and operated ship fleets with teams of experts to lay and maintain submarine cables. Marconi, with its wireless technology, was a threat to their cable hegemony.

The Eastern Telegraph Company serviced the communication hubs of the British Empire from the sea side of the Porthcurno settlement, from the west of Cornwall, where the submarine cables reached Indonesia, India, Africa, South America and Australia. After a skilful demonstration of the trans-Atlantic program on December 12th, 1901, VTK ordered Maskelene to undertake extended espionage operations.

Maskelin built a 50-meter-long radio beacon (the remnants of which still exist) on the cliffs west of Pfurkurno to see if he can eavesdrop on the messages that Marconi transmitted to ships as part of his highly successful message-passing business. . When publishing his letter to the magazine Electric / The Electrician on November 7th, 1902, Maskelin was pleased to announce the absence of a security system. “I received messages from Marconi with a 25-foot accumulating chain [over the air] mounted on a scaffolding rack. When the lighthouse was finally turned on, the only problem was not interception, but how to cope with an unusually high amount of energy. ”

It was not supposed that everything will be so simple. Marconi patented the technology of setting up a wireless transmitter for broadcasting within a certain wave. This setting, said Marconi, guaranteed confidentiality of communication channels. Anyone who has ever connected to a radio station knows that this is not the case, but at the time it was not so obvious. Maskelin proved this using a broadband receiver, through which he could eavesdrop.

By intercepting data, Maskelin wanted to draw more attention to the flaws of the technology, and also to show that interference with the transfer is possible. Therefore, he organized a hack at the Royal Institute, installing a simple Morseian transmitter with his father, not far from the western music hall.

The comic messages he sent could easily mix with those that Marconi personally sent from Cornwall, or he could destroy both messages if they were sent at the same time. Instead, they noticed a legitimate flaw in technology - and the only damage was inflicted by the ego of Marconi and Fleming.

Fleming continued to be indignant in the newspapers for weeks that the hacking that Maskelin held was an insult to science. Maskelin replied that Fleming should focus on facts. “I will remind Professor Fleming that scolding is not an argument,” he replied.

In modern times, many hackers end up showing technological flaws and omissions in security systems like Maskelin. In small tricks, there is always a benefit.

Source: Article in NewScientist.

PS Who knows the interesting stories of earlier “hacks” of technical systems (do not touch pigeon mail), for example, wired communication - share, I will be very grateful.