alumni

Stanford Engineering Puzzle

October 2006

Ever get those insidious e-mails ostensibly from your bank asking you to visit a site to update your account information? Those messages are almost always scams that use a technique called "phishing," as in, fishing for your password. The site they invite you to use may look like your bank's but it is actually run by hackers who capture your password when you "log in." Last year CS Professor John Mitchell and CS and EE Associate Professor Dan Boneh led a group of students in developing a tool called PwdHash, which protects you by scrambling your password so that it is unique for every site on the Web. In August, Boneh and Mitchell won a Computerworld Horizon Award, for the software.

Directions for puzzle

Taking a liberty with the theme of password encryption, this puzzle asks you to unscramble four passwords (something you cannot actually do to defeat PwdHash). All four words have something to do with computer security. When you get all four words unscrambled, a "secret word" will be revealed. For fun we will post (below) the names of ten alumni who successfully complete the puzzle and e-mail the secret word in the subject line to staff member Marge Kastner. She'll post entry number 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, etc. up to 91.

You must have Flash installed to run this puzzle, which was designed by Scott Kim of Shufflebrain and programmed by Larry Doyle of Cyberiandesign.

"Winning" entries

Congratulations to all! 211 correct entries in less than 24 hours. Hint: the secret word is not "SECRET." Here are the ones that came in at the right time to get mentioned.

  • 1) Ron Voight
  • 11) Tom Burkland
  • 21) Michale Malione
  • 31) Erick Delage
  • 41) Sommer Gentry
  • 51) David Hertzog
  • 61) Linda Knudson
  • 71) Ahmet Cullu
  • 81) Daniel Gabay
  • 91) Carolyn Calcagni

Try your hand at our other puzzles in the puzzle archive.