Carlsen gave me an idea

Been watching Magnus Carlsen for years. The man sees a chessboard differently than everyone else. You watch him make a move that looks completely ordinary, then ten moves later you realize the other guy has been walking into a cage the entire time.

That's the kind of thinking I respect.

Anyway, I was watching one of his matches from this year where he opened with the English Opening and something clicked.

Why not turn the game itself into a cipher?

I already had the first part built. Took a chessboard and mapped the squares to alphabetic characters. Obviously there are 64 squares and only 26 letters, so there is some repetition in the mapping. That is intentional. The square alone isn't enough.

Only Magnus's moves matter though. idk about the other player.

I used that particular 2026 Carlsen game to derive the key for a message I left behind on one of our victim's machines.

A chess game is public information. Nobody looks twice at it. That's what I like about this.

Millions of people can see the key material and have absolutely no idea they're looking at it.

I like the concept, but do not mistake obscurity for cryptographic strength. Once someone recognizes that the artifact is chess-related, the search space becomes substantially smaller.

That said, using a specific public game as external key material is clever. Especially if nothing on the victim's system identifies the game directly.

Exactly.

I'm not pretending I invented AES in my garage.

This is a puzzle with layers. The ciphertext tells you nothing about Carlsen. The board tells you nothing about which game. The game tells you nothing about how the moves interact with the board.

YOU HAVE TO MAKE THE CONNECTION.

And Magnus has played enough chess that "Carlsen game" doesn't exactly narrow things down much.

English Opening is a clue.

Only because I just told YOU that.

The victim didn't get this thread taped to their monitor. ;)

lol imagine the investigators pulling 900 magnus games and writing a parser because some old guy decided chess wasnt complicated enuff already

ngl using Magnus as key material is kinda based

but if your board has repeated letters somebody is absolutely gonna assume you messed it up 💀

GOOD.

Let them.

People have this strange assumption that every irregularity is a mistake. Sometimes the fastest way to hide a mechanism is to make part of it look badly designed.

Besides, the repetition forces them to understand the moves instead of treating the board as a simple substitution table.

I actually like that part.

A static square-to-letter mapping would be pretty easy to model once you recovered enough plaintext. Making the game sequence part of the interpretation means the board is more like a lookup layer than the cipher itself.

Also, using a famous player's game as external data has a nice "everyone has the file but nobody knows they have the file" quality to it.

That's exactly it.

The chess record isn't secret.

The algorithm isn't particularly magical.

The trick is knowing which ordinary pieces belong together.

People spend too much time looking for secret information when they should be looking for SECRET RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PUBLIC INFORMATION.

That's half the reason intelligence agencies collect boring garbage nobody thinks matters.

But that's another thread.

So somewhere an analyst is staring at your weird chessboard while you're sitting there watching Magnus clips 😂♟️

Honestly that's evil.

Also I give it like 20 minutes before someone writes Python to test every game automatically 😂

Let them write it.

Finding the right game still doesn't tell them what to extract.

And if they solve it?

Good.

A puzzle nobody can solve is just noise.

I want them to understand exactly what I did about five seconds before they realize what the hidden message says.

That's the fun part.