# What are the “natural language input messages” that were used to derive Streebog's constants?

This is more "cryptography trivia" than proper cryptography, but I'm curious. In Note on Streebog constants origin, V. Rudskoy says that the constants used in the definition of the Streebog hash were derived by taking a "Streebog-like hash function" (defined in the note), and running it on "12 different natural language input messages".

These 12 messages are given in a table, but only as opaque hexadecimal strings that are presumably some kind of encoded Russian text (maybe cp1251?). What is the encoding, and what do the texts mean, for those of us who don't read Cyrillic or speak Russian?

• This would be an excellent example of something up my sleeve numbers. I've never seen a real world instance. – Paul Uszak Aug 8 '17 at 0:40

If you reverse the bytes, and you decode in cp1251, you get a series of Cyrillic names.

• $C_1$: Гребнев
• $C_2$: Сергей Владимирович
• $C_3$: Дмух
• $C_4$: Андрей Александрович
• $C_5$: Дыгин
• $C_6$: Денис Михайлович
• $C_7$: Матюхин
• $C_8$: Дмитрий Викторович
• $C_9$: Рудской
• $C_{10}$: Владимир Игоревич
• $C_{11}$: Шишкин
• $C_{12}$: Василий Алексеевич

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to find who all these people might be. Hint: Рудской transliterates to Rudskoy.