The "Harriet" Fallacy: Why Your Hacker Bimbo Failed Math

Stupid Intelligence Company (SIC)
1 follower


December 16, 2025
🦄 The "Harriet" Fallacy: Why Your Hacker Bimbo Failed Math
We’ve seen some "Security Hacker Bimbos" like Harriet trying to "break" ZOSCII. Harriet thinks she’s clever because she can run a linear script. She takes an encoded file, matches it against the original, builds a "cheat sheet" (her harrietROM), and screams "BINGO!" when it decodes.

But Harriet forgot to shuffle the deck.

ZOSCII is Information-Theoretic. It is non-deterministic. Harriet’s "attack" is a snapshot of the past. The moment you send a second message, Harriet’s "recovered key" becomes 100% garbage.

What Harriet Got Wrong
1. The Snapshot Trap Harriet mapped one path through a forest. There are millions of other paths. Because she used a single "snapshot" to build her harrietROM, her map is 99.9% empty space. In a 16MB file, a single character might have 60,000 valid addresses; Harriet found one and thought she owned the city.

2. The Tautology (The "Cheat Sheet" Error) She "proved" that if you already have the answer key to a specific test, you can pass that test. Groundbreaking, Harriet. Using a known plaintext to reverse-engineer a single-pass encoding is not an "attack"—it's an observation of a state that will likely never exist again.

3. The Threat Model Delusion Harriet assumed that someone securing "Data A" would also disclose that it was "Data A." She assumes she has access to both the encoded and decoded versions simultaneously. That is not how security works. To claim a system is insecure because you handed the attacker your password is a logic failure that would embarrass a primary schooler.

4. Computational Blindness She is looking for a Cipher (Fixed Math). ZOSCII is a Coordinate Universe (Probabilistic Math). You don't break a universe; you just get lost in it. Harriet is trying to "find the key" to a door that doesn't exist.

🛡️ The Foundation Verdict
A ZOSCII ROM is not a key; it is the Authentication. It cannot be forged; it must be granted.

This is why the ZOSCII Foundation exists: to prevent "Bimbo Audits" from being mistaken for actual security research. We certify for Information-Theoretic Probability, not just computational difficulty. In Harriet’s world, the train stays in the station so she can photograph it. In the ZOSCII world, the train is already in another dimension.

Now that was a story about Harriet the Bimbo.

Below is even funnier.

ZOSCII "Attack" Analysis: When Known-Plaintext Attacks Miss the Point

Cyborg Unicorn
5 followers


December 16, 2025
A security researcher recently claimed to "break" ZOSCII using a chosen-plaintext attack. Let's walk through what he actually did—and why it proves he's attacking the wrong category of system entirely.

https://infosec.exchange/@harrysintonen/115724168928623487

What He Did (Step by Step)

Step 1: Generate and Encode a Message He created a random 4KB file as a ROM, wrote "This is a secret message" to a file, and encoded it with ZOSCII. Result: an address file (secretmessage.enc) pointing into the ROM. So far, standard ZOSCII usage.

Step 2: The "Attack" - Recovering the ROM Here's where it gets interesting. He created a special plaintext file containing every byte value (0-255) repeated 65,536 times—a 16MB file covering all possible bytes. He encoded THIS with the same ROM, then used a custom "findkey" tool to map which addresses pointed to which bytes. Result: a "recovered" ROM file.

Step 3: "Breaking" the Original Message He used the recovered ROM to decode the original message and—surprise—it worked! He declared ZOSCII "broken" and implied it's "fake encryption generated by AI."

Why This Completely Misses the Point

First Problem: He Already Knew the Plaintext His attack required creating a file with every possible byte value and encoding it. In a real attack, you intercept addresses only—you don't have the plaintext to map addresses back to bytes. His "attack" assumes you already know what you're trying to discover. It's circular reasoning: "I can break this... if you first tell me the answer."

Second Problem: He Recovered "A" ROM, Not "THE" ROM The reconstructed ROM is one valid interpretation that decodes those specific addresses to those specific byte values. But there are 10^598+ other possible ROMs that would decode the same addresses to completely different valid messages. The same address file could decode to "This is a secret message" with ROM-A, or "Here is a public recipe!" with ROM-B, or random gibberish with ROM-C. This isn't a bug—it's plausible deniability by design.

Third Problem: ROMs Don't Need to Be Secret ZOSCII security doesn't rely on keeping ROMs secret. You can use public Wikipedia images as ROMs. Security comes from knowing WHICH public file was used and WHEN. His entire attack assumes ROM secrecy is required—but that's not the ZOSCII threat model at all.

The Fundamental Category Error

Throughout his "attack," he calls ZOSCII "encryption" and claims to "recover the encryption key" and "decrypt" messages. But ZOSCII documentation explicitly states "NOT ENCRYPTION" over 100 times across multiple pages. It's address indirection—a fundamentally different paradigm based on information theory, not computational cryptography.

The Analogy His attack is like saying: "I can break a safe! First, tell me what's inside the safe. Then I can build a key that opens it to reveal... what you already told me was inside." That's not breaking the safe—that's working backwards from known contents.

What He Actually Proved He demonstrated that if you have both the plaintext AND the encoded addresses, you can reconstruct A VALID ROM that maps those addresses to those bytes. This is exactly how ZOSCII works—it's not a vulnerability, it's the mechanism. Without the plaintext, those addresses contain zero recoverable information.

Real ZOSCII Security In actual use, an attacker intercepts addresses only. They don't have the plaintext. They don't know which ROM was used. Even if they somehow reconstructed a ROM, they'd get one of 10^598+ valid interpretations with no way to verify which is "correct." And because ZOSCII encoding is non-deterministic, the same message encoded twice with the same ROM produces completely different addresses—automatic rolling keys with zero overhead.

The Core Issue This exchange perfectly illustrates the challenge QPS (Quantum-Proof Security) faces against PQCC (Post-Quantum Computational Cryptography) thinking. When encryption experts encounter a non-encryption system, they apply encryption attacks and declare it "broken"—without engaging with the actual mathematics of information theory and combinatorics.

The Question Remains If addresses 01 02 03 04 05 contain zero recoverable information without knowing which of 10^598+ possible ROMs was used, what exactly is being "attacked" in a known-plaintext scenario? The challenge isn't the math—it's getting past the assumption that all security must be encryption.

You would think that someone who claims to be a security person would actually not make false claims... but instead he did.

And he didn't like to be proven wrong - so deleted the last thread from MorphOS channel when I offered to help for free.

For moron's like Harriet that think ZOSCII is like a OTP, think again.

https://zoscii.com/wiki/?wiki=english/index&title=English

JS Encoder / Decoder:

encode = (r,m) => [...m].map(c => [...r].map((b,i)=>b==c?i:[]).flat().sort(()=>Math.random()-.5)[0]);

decode = (r,a) => a.map(a => r[a]).join('');

C Encoder:

https://zoscii.com/wiki/?wiki=english/chapter-6-7-modernc-zstrength&title=Modern%20C%20zstrength%20Source

Some morons like Harriet thing the encoding is deterministic. LOL

If anyone believes there can be a pattern in the random numbers with an indirection to what the answer might be. Reply here?

Why is this important? It is the foundation of ZOSCII - the World's first 'Practical' Quantum Proof Security - it is not encryption, it falls under a category called Information Theoretic Security - there are 3 of those that I know of - OTP (One Time Pads which is an encryption), SSS (Shamir's Secret Sharing) and now ZOSCII. They all share some common properties but they also all have some differences. zoscii.com MIT Licensed

SSS and ZOSCII are both information-theoretic security approaches that remove the message from intercepted data through different mechanisms. SSS uses polynomial splitting (shares contain no information without threshold), ZOSCII uses address indirection (addresses contain no information without reference file). Both achieve quantum-proof security not through computational hardness, but through information absence.