Another Satyam Fiasco ....
No jokes - job loss is serious business but still this episode is worth a mention. There is a sizable sum of fresher from 2008 batch who had been offered a job at Satyam. With Satyam's financial fiasco unraveling itself, the fate of these freshers lies in a limbo. They have an online community on orkut named “Satyam 2008”. Below is the link to the NDTV article
A guy on the list comes up with a brilliant idea for show of unity. The idea is to collect a digital copy of the offer letter from all members enrolled on the orkut group (and send it to some basket case politician or something). Hmmm, I cannot explain it more spicy terms, if this hasn’t got you interested already. The truth of the matter is everybody is interested in everybody else’s offer letter. So someone surely was going to play foul. So collecting offer letters though a noble idea was surely not a simple task, (if to be done correctly). It’s a good game with a number of potential rouge players. Believe me they had a hard time doing it.
Ok…. the solution they came for collecting offer letters.
1. Create an email account
satyam_offered_letters@XXXX
pwd=XYXXXX
2. Post it on their orkut message board _ALONG_ WITH THE _PASSWORD_ and everybody mails theirs offer letters to this account.
YEAH … all set !!, some one should have fainted by now before saying “Please Explain” for such a wonderful scheme (pun surely intended). I would prefer, kindly saying WTF MORONS ? Even when I was a kid I would not have given the password for the account out, I mean password is only for girlfriends. Ha Ha Ha .... twiddling finger twidling fingers after about some time some one just changed the password, I am so @#!$@!#$@!# that someone at least had the brains to see the flaw in the scheme and now has access to all the offer letters. Act dumb …. beg dumb !. Thinking of it for sometime, I decided to come up with a slightly more secure scheme for gathering all the offer letters. It’s quite interesting and though it may sound super fanciful.
TASK is to get all the offer letters in a Central location and securely hand them over to the authority.
1. Select N most popular Coordinators amongst the group members who can physically meet up. (higher the N more secure the system, lower N’s are convenient).
These guys are the leaders of the group, whom one can blame if anything goes wrong. The selection procedure is simple every member A of the group votes for every other member B in the group if A personally knows B. At the end of the vote the members with the highest number of votes wins. The system will fail if there are more bluffers than numbers of members who know the most popular members. The idea is still _fairly_ secure because it is difficult to predict and inject a number of bluffers to introduce to swing in the decision because neither the most popular person nor his vote count is known to anyone in the start. (Shhh ........ I know one can just add (count/2)+1 bluffers but it can be detected)
If all the coordinators run away with the offer letters there are chances that at least one can be tracked. This is because they won the election due to their popularity. Everybody then makes note of the ORKUT ID of the co-coordinators, (just to be sure they are not interacting with a person with the same name).
In the end you should get N most popular members ready to act as coordinators. employ some dumb tie breaks also, like in case of a tie choose a girl coordinator over a boy. This will make people enthusiastically send in their offer letters. Also a girl would coordinate sincerely and in all probability will not run faster than a guy if she decides too.
3. Prepare to Encrypt.
The co-coordinators are ordered sequentially according to their Orkut-ids. Each of these co-coordinators publishes his public key on this orkut account. Each of the co-coordinator also publishes a digitally signed (using his private key) responsibility certificate claiming responsibility and some form of identification (ID/PASSPORT/ETC) signed using his digital signature. The responsibility certificates are augmented by digital signatures from all the members who voted positively for the given co-coordinator.
At the end of this step each of the coordinator has presented a digitally signed responsibility certificate and his public key via his orkut profile.
4. Encryption of offer letters.
Every member then chain encrypts (one after the other) his offer letter using public key of the selected coordinators. The order of encryption is some order of the orkut-ids of the coordinators.
5. Mail in offer letters.
Every body mails their encrypted offer letters to each of the coordinators on their gmail accounts (you can get this from their orkut profile).
6. Decryption of offer letters.
All the coordinators meet at a selected location. This location is where the four roads meet & just to the left of the road that extends north. ….. there is banyan tree with a sage under it. The last coordinator in orkutid-order is then chained to the banyan tree (because he can run away in the end) with locks from all other coordinators. Then each offer letter is chain decrypted using the private keys of the coordinators. He then hands the offer letter over to the authority and is then unlocked and is beaten up by the security guards of the politician (because they won't understand the whole tree, lock blah blah blah thing)
(The scheme was outlined with inputs from my teammates , most notably Abhijeet Paithankar a.k.a BATMAN. )
A guy on the list comes up with a brilliant idea for show of unity. The idea is to collect a digital copy of the offer letter from all members enrolled on the orkut group (and send it to some basket case politician or something). Hmmm, I cannot explain it more spicy terms, if this hasn’t got you interested already. The truth of the matter is everybody is interested in everybody else’s offer letter. So someone surely was going to play foul. So collecting offer letters though a noble idea was surely not a simple task, (if to be done correctly). It’s a good game with a number of potential rouge players. Believe me they had a hard time doing it.
Ok…. the solution they came for collecting offer letters.
1. Create an email account
satyam_offered_letters@XXXX
pwd=XYXXXX
2. Post it on their orkut message board _ALONG_ WITH THE _PASSWORD_ and everybody mails theirs offer letters to this account.
YEAH … all set !!, some one should have fainted by now before saying “Please Explain” for such a wonderful scheme (pun surely intended). I would prefer, kindly saying WTF MORONS ? Even when I was a kid I would not have given the password for the account out, I mean password is only for girlfriends. Ha Ha Ha .... twiddling finger twidling fingers after about some time some one just changed the password, I am so @#!$@!#$@!# that someone at least had the brains to see the flaw in the scheme and now has access to all the offer letters. Act dumb …. beg dumb !. Thinking of it for sometime, I decided to come up with a slightly more secure scheme for gathering all the offer letters. It’s quite interesting and though it may sound super fanciful.
TASK is to get all the offer letters in a Central location and securely hand them over to the authority.
1. Select N most popular Coordinators amongst the group members who can physically meet up. (higher the N more secure the system, lower N’s are convenient).
These guys are the leaders of the group, whom one can blame if anything goes wrong. The selection procedure is simple every member A of the group votes for every other member B in the group if A personally knows B. At the end of the vote the members with the highest number of votes wins. The system will fail if there are more bluffers than numbers of members who know the most popular members. The idea is still _fairly_ secure because it is difficult to predict and inject a number of bluffers to introduce to swing in the decision because neither the most popular person nor his vote count is known to anyone in the start. (Shhh ........ I know one can just add (count/2)+1 bluffers but it can be detected)
If all the coordinators run away with the offer letters there are chances that at least one can be tracked. This is because they won the election due to their popularity. Everybody then makes note of the ORKUT ID of the co-coordinators, (just to be sure they are not interacting with a person with the same name).
In the end you should get N most popular members ready to act as coordinators. employ some dumb tie breaks also, like in case of a tie choose a girl coordinator over a boy. This will make people enthusiastically send in their offer letters. Also a girl would coordinate sincerely and in all probability will not run faster than a guy if she decides too.
3. Prepare to Encrypt.
The co-coordinators are ordered sequentially according to their Orkut-ids. Each of these co-coordinators publishes his public key on this orkut account. Each of the co-coordinator also publishes a digitally signed (using his private key) responsibility certificate claiming responsibility and some form of identification (ID/PASSPORT/ETC) signed using his digital signature. The responsibility certificates are augmented by digital signatures from all the members who voted positively for the given co-coordinator.
At the end of this step each of the coordinator has presented a digitally signed responsibility certificate and his public key via his orkut profile.
4. Encryption of offer letters.
Every member then chain encrypts (one after the other) his offer letter using public key of the selected coordinators. The order of encryption is some order of the orkut-ids of the coordinators.
5. Mail in offer letters.
Every body mails their encrypted offer letters to each of the coordinators on their gmail accounts (you can get this from their orkut profile).
6. Decryption of offer letters.
All the coordinators meet at a selected location. This location is where the four roads meet & just to the left of the road that extends north. ….. there is banyan tree with a sage under it. The last coordinator in orkutid-order is then chained to the banyan tree (because he can run away in the end) with locks from all other coordinators. Then each offer letter is chain decrypted using the private keys of the coordinators. He then hands the offer letter over to the authority and is then unlocked and is beaten up by the security guards of the politician (because they won't understand the whole tree, lock blah blah blah thing)
(The scheme was outlined with inputs from my teammates , most notably Abhijeet Paithankar a.k.a BATMAN. )
posted by Faraz Ahmed Shaikh | 6:30 PM
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