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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RandomUsernamehmimo71" data-source="post: 2534183" data-attributes="member: 9051">"Well, you certainly have some of them, but I can see a few obvious ones that are missing that I know I had mapped earlier. Let me guess, you mapped what its giving off now, right? That's useful, but I want to see how it responds to different frequencies. How it changes when we expose it to different levels of radiation. It's going to take weeks of testing, but once it's done...""Once it's done it might change everything. We could change the face of underwater warfare. But the NID aren't bad people. At least not most of them. They're just scientists. It's just that-" Felger drops his voice to a whisper "They are a little overzealous. Not much, but a little."As the two of you work, Chloe would be happy to sit and talk a little to Julian, whenever Dr. Felger didn't need her this second. She's obviously interested in Felger's every move, and seems not to take offense at his behavior to her."It's not done yet, of course. But the X301 is going to be pretty amazing. We're.. They're... Working on taking some of the engines from the badguy spaceships, figuring out how they work, and building an airforce ship around them. It's pretty exciting!"I'm sure it will be, if they ever get it off the ground. Right now, it's a gigantic boondoogle. We're working on the interesting things, anyway. I'm still writing a test plan of frequencies to expose this device to, and then we can go forward with that. Remember, we need to be careful, and document the entire way, or it's worse than not finding it out at all. Have you made any progress on that CD?Julian will find that the CD is encoded with AES three seperate times, each with a different key. He knows that they isn't really a back door in the algorithm, and it's cryptographically sound. No matter how good you are, you can't break it. That said, it can be brute forced- Basically trying every possible combination, until the result is something that looks like text.Chloe will set Julian up to log into one of the base mainframes, which will start chugging away on decoding the key. He is likely impressed with the speed of the mainframe in running through the key combinations, particularly after he adjusts the algorithm used to select keys. Julian {{OOC: Using computers, Roll of 16 + 23  = 39. You use your computer bonus, since your using your computer to program the mainframe. }} adjusts the algorithm to select the most likely keys first, and adjusts the software so that it runs 5x more efficiently using caching of common mathmatical results, and pre-computed hash tables.As he waiting for the results, looking over the CD and it's data dump on his HD (Never work with the original) Julian would have a sinking suspicion that people who went through this much trouble, and who were as paranoid as the NID, would likely have another layer of security on under this one, and probably more complex.A few hours later, Julian's fears will be shown to be correct. The computer made a map of all possible decodings, but none of them made any sense. It is if every possible key leads to random data. Temporarily putting aside the idea that there is no correct key, Julian begins exploring the possibility that one of the decodings is an encrypted one-time pad. The way a one time pad works in that each letter of a message, or bit of a file, is offset by a specific amount, which varies for each letter/bit. This is incredibly secure, mathmatically unbreakable, but it has the massive downside of requiring the exact same amout of space to store a key, as the message encoded. For example, to encode the sequence 12345, with they key 34512, you'd get the answer 46857. Without knowing either they key or the original sequence, it's impossible to get the other. Looking at the problem deeper {{OOC: With his 13 + 16 = 29 in Crypto (you can often add your computer bonus to this check, for future reference) }} Julian will know that they were likely more clever that that. They're not just using one of the one time pads, they're likely using all of them, to different degrees. A one time pad in general would be mathmatically uncrackable, but if it hid it's details on the different possible keys, it would not only be uncrackable, but difficult even if he had the key disc. But he'd need that to make any progress at all. As it is, he'd have 200,000,000 different sets of keys, each of which would be mathmatically impossible to decode. Basically, he needs to find the decoding disc to be able to use it.{{OOC: By the game rules, whomever encoded this disc made a critical success.  To decode it, you need to make a critical success as well, and roll higher than they did. Real world mathmateics say it's impossible. Verisimitude/Movie Physics say it's just really hard. Either way, you need the key to get further.}}</blockquote>

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