Rethink-Your-Strategy Whitepaper is confirmed to be fake

Quote from: bitcoinbear on August 18, 2014, 03:20:36 AM

I was impressed by the amount of work you've put to compile everything in one place. While checking your claims regarding CryptoNote whitepaper, I noticed the same XMP timestamps and other evidence that you posted.

However, there is one thing that you did not check-out when I tried to repeat your experiment. Van Saberhagen's public key on CryptoNote website cannot be used to validite the PDF. While checking, I got this message:

Some new surprising information was found on Bytecoin's website. It hosts a very similar whitepaper v.2, which turns out to be different if you study it carefully. What's more, van Saberhagen's public key matches on CryptoNote and Bytecoin websites. It seems that Bytecoin may hold a genuine Saberhagen whitepaper as it can be verified with the published public key - however since his identity remains unknown, we can only speculate.

I then decided to continue with experiment by comparing the paper found on Bytecoin with the one CryptoNote's website. For easier references I'll call them bcn-whitepaper and cn-whitepaper. The bcn-whitepaper will always goes first on the pictures unless explicitly stated otherwise.

When opening the bcn-whitepaper we can see the article structure.

Which is not the case for cn-whitepaper.

Opening the PDF we notice the valid signature inside:

The signature date on bcn-whitepaper is almost the same as on cn-whitepaper but slightly differs in size. This by itself, points that further discrepancies may exist between the two whitepapers. I decided to continue my investigation by studying the signature details (bcn - to the left, cn - to the right):

Everything looks quite the same with the exception of the SHA and MD5 fingerprints. Moving on to the XMP properties, we can see that they are also different.

Bcn-whitepaper holds perfectly clear signatures. The CreateDate is 2013 as it should be. The pdfTeX version x.x.13 also existed. There is totally nothing strange about these tags. Unlike the whitepaper from CryptoNote website that was studied before.

Apparently, Bytecoin's whitepaper is quite consistent in terms of timelines.

The remaining question is which whitepaper may have been the genuine one.

I would assume that having exactly the same van Saberhagen's public keys posted on both websites, it would not be unlikely that it really belongs to Saberhagen - particularly since both keys validate the bcn-whitepaper.

Also, upon a careful examination of Bytecoin's whitepaper I found a watermark, which is usually hard to identify. Here it is in the whitepaper (just after the Appendix):

Most may be unable to see it because it is non-selectable, can't be copied and is transparent. You might be able to see it as a small highlighted field (e.g. if you open it with Chrome).

It turns out that the watermark appears in the tooltip for that field. Here is the tooltip's content:

This is a PGP key perfectly matching public van Saberhagen's key published on both websites.

Hence, there is a PGP signature hidden in the Bytecoin's whitepaper, but there is no such watermark in the one found on CryptoNote's website.

Are these 2 documents anyhow different apart from that? I've checked with adobe document compare tools, and it seems that they're either complete copies, or have very minor indistinguishable differences like the following three. These formulas appear to be the same, but not to the compare tool:

My Conclusions

1. It is very likely the Bytecoin website hosts the genuine whitepaper.

2. The whitepaper published on CryptoNote's website may be a forgery. There is no PGP watermark and the author's PGP public key can't be used to validate the whitepaper.

3. Someone has duplicated the genuine whitepaper line by line for them to look the same - but failed at capturing some of its hidden elements.

4. Now let's move to whitepaper v.1 on CN website. As there is no signature to validate this whitepaper, the only relevant test is watermark. If it's inside, then the asumption on CryptoNote's conspiracy may hold. However, whitepaper v.1 doesn't have this watermark.

5. The problems with latex compilator problems, XMP meta tags, and invalid links may point to a forgery attempt, not van Saberhagen's actual activity.

Unclear questions for further research

1) What and why did we find two strange whitepapers on the CryptoNote website? A number of options may be valid. I assume it could be a mistake, a social engineering trap, hacked website or someone's attempt to discredit the technology? Who knows.

I'll point CryptoNote that they may have a wrong whitepaper. Maybe they will care to comment or take actions.