Elonka Dunin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
Elonka Dunin

Elonka Dunin, 2006
Born December 29, 1958 (1958-12-29) (age 50)
Santa Monica, California
Occupation Video game developer
Website
www.elonka.com

Elonka Dunin (pronounced /ɨˈlɒŋkə ˈdʌnɨn/; born December 29, 1958, Santa Monica, California) is a game developer[1] at Simutronics Corp. in St. Louis, Missouri. She is one of the founders of the International Game Developers Association's Online Games group, and was editor in chief of an IGDA State of the Industry white paper.

Dunin has published a book of exercises on classical cryptography, and maintains a website on the Kryptos sculptural cryptogram, which is located at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia.[1][2][3] She has given several lectures on the subject of cryptography,[4][5] and according to the PBS series NOVA scienceNOW she is "generally considered the leading Kryptos expert in the world."[6]

Contents

[edit] Biography

Elonka Dunin was born in Santa Monica, California, the older of two children to Stanley Dunin, a Polish-American mathematician, and Elsie Ivancich, a Croatian-American dance ethnologist at UCLA.[7]

Dunin graduated in 1976 from University High School. She was enrolled as an undergraduate at UCLA, majoring in astronomy for roughly one year,[7] after which she joined the United States Air Force,[8] working as an avionics technician at RAF Mildenhall in the United Kingdom and Beale Air Force Base in California.[9]

In the 1980s, she became involved with the growing BBS culture and in one year spent $15,000 on computer time.[10] In 1989, while working as a temporary legal secretary in Los Angeles,[10] this interest overlapped into the early multiplayer games, such as British Legends on CompuServe and Simutronics' GemStone II on GEnie.

[edit] Online games

In 1990, Dunin moved to St. Louis and began working for the online game company Simutronics.[9][11] Simutronics launched its own website, play.net, in 1997 with Dunin as General Manager of Online Games,[12] managing Simutronics' online community.[13][14] Dunin was the product manager for GemStone III, executive producer for the Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess-based multiplayer game Alliance of Heroes, and worked on the development of most of Simutronics' other products, including CyberStrike, Modus Operandi, DragonRealms and the upcoming Hero's Journey. She currently is the "General Manager of Online Community". She is a founding member of the International Game Developers Association's Online Games SIG and edited two of their annual White Papers on various aspects of the online game industry: "Web and Downloadable Games" and "Persistent Worlds."[15][16]

[edit] Cryptanalysis

In interviews with GIGnews.com, Dunin said that in the year 2000 she cracked the PhreakNIC v3.0 Code, an amateur cryptographic puzzle created by a hacker group.[17][unreliable source?][18]

Dunin is co-moderator of a Yahoo Group that is attempting to decipher the Kryptos sculptural cryptogram,[19] and she also maintains a comprehensive website about the sculpture.[1][20] Because of its location on CIA grounds, physical access to Kryptos is restricted. According to Wired News, in 2002, she gave a presentation to CIA analysts about steganography and al-Qaida.[21] According to the same source, "[i]n 2002, Dunin was one of the lucky few who saw the works in person", and "she also made rubbings of the text".

In 2003, Dunin translated the text of Kryptos's sister sculpture, the Cyrillic Projector from Russian. The key to decrypting the sculpture had been discovered by Mike Bales, a computer programmer in Michigan and Frank Corr, a computer programmer in North Carolina.[22][23][24]

The plaintext of the first three out of four sections of the message engraved on Kryptos has been publicly revealed in 1999 by California computer scientist Jim Gillogly. According to an article in The New York Times, in 2006 James Sanborn, the artist who created the Kryptos sculpture, contacted Dunin to point out an error in the decryption.[1] The error was caused by a missing letter x in the ciphertext, which was intentionally omitted by Sanborn "for aesthetic reasons, to keep the sculpture visually balanced."[20] Sanborn later confirmed to Dunin the correct plaintext.[1] Despite this progress, the last section of Kryptos remains undeciphered.

In 2006, Dunin published a book of 600 exercises in classical cryptography, which was published in the United States as The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms, and in the UK as The Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles. The book also includes a few details about Kryptos.[20] In July 2007 she appeared on the PBS program NOVA scienceNOW, as an expert on Kryptos.

[edit] Public speaking

Dunin has given talks on Kryptos and the Cyrillic Projector at the National Security Agency's NSA Cryptologic History Symposium,[4] Def Con 12,[5] Shmoocon 2006,[25] and Notacon 3,[26] and a talk on steganography at PhreakNIC 6.[18] She also gave lectures at Dragon*Con,[citation needed] and the International Game Developers Conference.[27][28] She has been invited to be a co-host on the Binary Revolution webcast three times.[29]

[edit] Books

  • Dunin, Elonka (April 2006). The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms. New York, United States: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-1726-2. 
  • Dunin, Elonka (April 2006). The Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles. London, United Kingdom: Constable & Robinson. ISBN 1-84529-325-8. 

[edit] Co-authored chapters in white papers

  • IGDA Online Games White Paper, 2002. PDF
  • IGDA Online Games White Paper, 2003. PDF
  • IGDA Web & Downloadable Games White Paper, 2004. PDF
  • IGDA Persistent Worlds White Paper, 2004. PDF

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d e Chang, Kenneth (April 22, 2006). "A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980CE5DA153FF931A15757C0A9609C8B63. 
  2. ^ "London Lawyers Turn Into Code-Breakers". The Washington Post. April 27, 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/27/AR2006042701765.html. 
  3. ^ "Enigmatic CIA Puzzle Kryptos May Be Flawed" NPR All Things Considered, April 21, 2006
  4. ^ a b "NSA Cryptologic History Symposium in 2005". kryptos.yak.net. http://kryptos.yak.net/50. Retrieved on 2008-11-13. 
  5. ^ a b Defcon 12: Kryptos and the Cracking of the Cyrillic Projector Cipher
  6. ^ "Kryptos". NOVA scienceNOW. July 2007. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/video/3411/q03-220.html. Retrieved on October 13, 2007. 
  7. ^ a b Dunin, Elonka (February 21, 2006). "Elonka Dunin - Autobiography". http://elonka.com/autobiography.html. Retrieved on January 5, 2009. 
  8. ^ "Tommarello Interview with Elonka Dunin". elonka.com. http://elonka.com/articles/tommarello.html. Retrieved on November 13, 2008. "Elonka does not have a college degree, but has a wide breadth of practical experience to draw upon. After dropping out of college, she spent six years in the Air Force as an Avionics Instruments System Specialist." 
  9. ^ a b Stage, Wm. (August 28, 2006). "Elonka Dunin's ability to crack codes is stuff books are made of". St. Charles County Business Record. 
  10. ^ a b Batz, Jeannette (June 19, 2002). ""When Dragons Escape"". Riverfront Times. http://www.riverfronttimes.com/issues/2002-06-19/news_full.html. Retrieved on February 7, 2007. 
  11. ^ McCrary, William S. (January 9, 1994). "Games People Play". St. Charles Journal. 
  12. ^ Pendleton, Jennifer (August 18, 1997). "Trends: Nice Work If You Can Master It". Los Angeles Times: p. 6. 
  13. ^ Kim, Amy Jo (2000). Community Building on the Web : Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities. Peachpit Press. ISBN 0-201-87484-9. 
  14. ^ Austin, Nancy K (October 19, 1999). "Pure Internet play. Simutronics' online games.". Inc 21 (15): p. 75. 
  15. ^ "Web and Downloadable Games White Paper" (PDF). IGDA. 2004. http://igda.org/online/IGDA_WebDL_Whitepaper_2004.pdf. Retrieved on February 24, 2009. 
  16. ^ "Persistent Worlds White Paper" (PDF). IGDA. 2004. http://igda.org/online/IGDA_PSW_Whitepaper_2004.pdf. Retrieved on February 24, 2009. 
  17. ^ Cambron, Melanie (May 2002). "A Chat with Elonka Dunin". GIGnews.com. http://www.gignews.com/goddess/dunin.htm. Retrieved on October 31, 2008. 
  18. ^ a b PhreakNIC 6 schedule
  19. ^ Redman, Justine; Ensor, David (June 20, 2005). ""Cracking the code"". CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/06/19/cracking.the.code/index.html. Retrieved on February 8, 2007. 
  20. ^ a b c Zetter, Kim (April 20, 2006). "Typo Confounds Kryptos Sleuths". Wired News. CondéNet, Inc.. http://wired.com./science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70701. 
  21. ^ Zetter, Kim (January 21, 2005). "Solving the Enigma of Kryptos". Wired.com. http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/01/66334. Retrieved on October 31, 2008. 
  22. ^ Seife, Charles (October 7, 2003). "Cryptic Sculpture Cracked". Science Now. Archived from the original on 2004-03-11. http://elonka.com/kryptos/mirrors/ScienceMagazine.html. 
  23. ^ Cyrillic Riddle Solved Science, vol 302, 10 October 2003, page 224
  24. ^ Kintisch, Eli (2003-10-08). "Woman sets sights on code on CIA sculpture". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Archived from the original on 2004-03-11. http://www.elonka.com/mirrors/STL/sights.html. 
  25. ^ "ShmooCon". www.shmoocon.org. http://www.shmoocon.org/2006/presentations.html. Retrieved on November 13, 2008. 
  26. ^ "NOTACON". www.notacon.org. http://www.notacon.org/archive/2006/speakers.html. Retrieved on November 13, 2008. 
  27. ^ "Dragon*Con Biography: Elonka Dunin". Dragoncon.org. 2000. Archived from the original on 2001-03-08. http://web.archive.org/web/20010308165958/http://www.dragoncon.org/people/dunine.html. 
  28. ^ "Game Developers Conference 2008 Speakers: Elonka Dunin". CMPEvents.com. https://www.cmpevents.com/GD08/a.asp?option=G&V=3&id=92209. Retrieved on October 31, 2008. 
  29. ^ Episodes #78, #99 and #156, Binary Revolution, interviews by David Blake.

[edit] External links

Search Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Elonka Dunin
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elonka_Dunin"
Personal tools