Chapter 4
The crypto
door beeped once, waking Susan from her depressing reverie. The door had rotated
past its fully open position and would be closed again in five seconds, having
made a complete 360-degree rotation. Susan gathered
her thoughts and stepped through the opening.
A computer made note of her entry.
Although
she had practically lived in Crypto since its completion three years ago, the sight of it still amazed her. The main room was an enormous
circular chamber that rose five stories. Its transparent, domed ceiling towered 120 feet at its central
peak. The Plexiglas
cupola was embedded with a polycarbonate mesh–a
protective web capable of withstanding a two-megaton blast. The screen
filtered the sunlight
into delicate lacework
across the walls.
Tiny particles of dust drifted upward
in wide unsuspecting spirals–captives
of
the dome’s powerful deionizing system.
The room’s
sloping sides arched broadly
at the top and then became almost vertical
as they approached eye level. Then they became subtly translucent and graduated to an opaque black as they reached the floor–a
shimmering expanse of polished black tile that shone with an eerie luster,
giving one the unsettling sensation that the floor was transparent. Black ice.
Pushing through the center of the floor like the tip of a colossal torpedo was the machine for which the dome had been built. Its sleek black contour
arched twenty-three feet in the air before
plunging back into the floor below. Curved and smooth, it was as if an enormous killer whale had been frozen
mid breach in a frigid sea.
This was
TRANSLTR, the single
most expensive piece
of computing equipment in the world–a machine the NSA swore did not exist.
Like an iceberg, the machine hid 90 percent of its mass and power deep beneath the surface.
Its secret was locked in a ceramic silo that went six stories straight down–a rocketlike hull surrounded by a winding
maze of catwalks, cables, and hissing
exhaust from the freon cooling
system.
The power generators at the bottom droned in a perpetual
low-frequency hum that gave the acoustics in Crypto a dead, ghostlike
quality.
* * *
TRANSLTR,
like all great technological advancements, had been a child of necessity. During the 1980s, the NSA witnessed a revolution in telecommunications that would change the world of intelligence reconnaissance forever–public access to the Internet. More specifically, the arrival
of E-mail.
Criminals, terrorists, and spies had grown tired of having their phones
tapped and immediately embraced this new means of global communication. E-mail had the security
of conventional mail and the speed of the telephone. Since the transfers
traveled through underground fiber-optic lines and were never transmitted into the airwaves,
they were entirely intercept-proof–at least
that was the perception.
In reality,
intercepting E-mail as it zipped across the Internet
was child’s play for the NSA’s techno-gurus. The Internet
was not the new home computer
revelation that most believed. It had been created
by the Department of Defense three decades earlier–an enormous network of computers designed to provide secure government communication in the event of nuclear war. The eyes and ears of the NSA were old Internet
pros. People conducting illegal business via E-mail
quickly learned their secrets were not as private as they’d thought. The FBI, DEA, IRS, and other
U.S. law enforcement agencies–aided by the NSA’s staff of wily hackers–enjoyed a tidal wave of arrests and convictions.
Of course,
when the computer users of the world found out the U.S. government had open access to their E-mail communications, a cry of outrage went up. Even pen pals, using E-mail for nothing more than recreational correspondence, found the lack of privacy unsettling. Across the globe, entrepreneurial programmers began working on a way to keep E-mail more secure.
They quickly found one
and public-key encryption was born.
Public-key encryption was a concept as simple as it was brilliant. It consisted
of easy-to-use, home-computer software that scrambled personal E-mail messages in such a way that they were totally
unreadable. A user could write a letter and run it through the encryption software, and the text would come out the other side looking like random nonsense–totally illegible–a code. Anyone intercepting the transmission
found only an unreadable garble
on the screen.
The only way to unscramble the message was to enter the sender’s “pass-key”–a secret series of characters that functioned much like a PIN number
at an automatic teller. The pass-keys were generally quite long and complex; they carried all the information necessary
to instruct the encryption algorithm exactly what mathematical operations to follow tore-create the original
message.
A user could now send E-mail in confidence. Even if the transmission was intercepted, only those
who were given
the key could ever decipher
it.
The NSA felt the crunch immediately. The codes they were facing
were no longer simple
substitution ciphers
crackable with pencil and graph paper–they were computer-generated hash functions
that employed chaos theory
and multiple symbolic
alphabets to scramble
messages into seemingly hopeless randomness.
At first, the pass-keys being used were short enough for the NSA’s computers to “guess.”
If a desired
pass-key had ten digits,
a computer was programmed to try every possibility between 0000000000 and 9999999999. Sooner or later the computer hit the correct sequence. This method of trial-and-error guessing was known as “brute
force attack.” It was time-consuming but mathematically guaranteed to work.
As the world got wise to the power of brute-force code-breaking, the pass-keys
started getting longer and longer. The computer time needed to “guess”
the correct key grew from weeks to months
and finally to years.
By the 1990s, pass-keys
were over fifty characters long and employed
the full 256-character ASCII alphabet of letters,
numbers, and symbols. The number of different
possibilities was in the neighborhood of 10120–ten with 120 zeros after it. Correctly
guessing a pass-key was as mathematically unlikely as choosing the correct grain of sand from a three-mile beach. It was estimated that a successful brute-force attack on a standard sixty-four-bit key would take the NSA’s fastest
computer–the top-secret Cray/Josephson II–over nineteen years to break. By the time the computer guessed
the key and broke
the code, the contents of the message would
be irrelevant.
Caught in a virtual
intelligence blackout, the NSA passed a top-secret directive that was endorsed
by the President
of the United States. Buoyed by federal funds and a carte blanche to do whatever was necessary
to solve the problem,
the NSA set out to build the impossible: the world’s
first universal code-breaking machine.
Despite
the opinion of many engineers that the newly proposed code-breaking computer was impossible to build, the NSA lived by its motto: Everything is possible.
The impossible just takes longer.
Five years, half a million
man-hours, and $1.9 billion later,
the NSA proved it once again. The last of the three million,
stamp-size processors was hand-soldered in place, the final internal
programming was finished, and the ceramic shell was
welded shut. TRANSLTR had been born.
Although
the secret internal
workings of TRANSLTR
were the product of many minds and were not fully understood by any one individual, its basic principle
was simple: Many hands make light
work.
Its three million
processors would all work in parallel–counting upward at blinding
speed, trying every new permutation
as they went. The hope was that even codes with unthinkably colossal pass-keys
would not be safe from TRANSLTR’s tenacity. This multibillion-dollar masterpiece would use the power of parallel
processing as well as some highly classified advances in clear text assessment to guess pass-keys
and break codes. It would derive its power not only from its staggering number of processors but also from new advances in quantum
computing–an emerging
technology that allowed information to be stored as quantum-mechanical states rather than solely as binary
data.
The moment
of truth came on a blustery
Thursday morning in October.
The first live test. Despite
uncertainty about how fast the machine
would be, there was one thing on which the engineers
agreed–if the processors all functioned in parallel,
TRANSLTR would be powerful.
The question was how powerful.
The answer
came twelve minutes
later. There was a stunned
silence from the handful
in attendance when the printout sprang
to life and delivered the cleartext–the broken code. TRANSLTR
had just located a sixty-four-character key in a little over ten minutes, almost a million times
faster than the two decades it would have taken the NSA’s second-fastest computer.
Led by the deputy
director of operations, Commander Trevor J. Strathmore, the NSA’s Office
of Production had triumphed. TRANSLTR was a success.
In the interest
of keeping their success a secret,
Commander Strathmore immediately leaked information that the project
had been a complete failure. All the activity in the Crypto wing was supposedly an attempt to salvage their $2 billion fiasco. Only the NSA elite knew the truth–TRANSLTR was cracking hundreds
of codes every day.
With word on the street that computer-encrypted
codes were entirely unbreakable–even by the all-powerful NSA–the secrets poured
in. Drug lords, terrorists, and embezzlers alike–weary of having their cellular phone transmissions intercepted–were turning to the exciting new medium of encrypted
E-mail for instantaneous global communications. Never again would they have to face a grand jury and hear their own voice rolling
off tape, proof of some long-forgotten cellular phone
conversation plucked from the air by an
NSA satellite.
Intelligence gathering had never been easier. Codes intercepted by the NSA entered
TRANSLTR as totally illegible
ciphers and were spit out minutes later as perfectly
readable cleartext. No more secrets.
To make their charade
of incompetence complete, the NSA lobbied
fiercely against
all new
computer encryption software, insisting it crippled them and made it impossible for lawmakers to catch and prosecute
the criminals. Civil rights groups rejoiced, insisting the NSA shouldn’t
be reading their mail anyway. Encryption software kept rolling off the presses.
The NSA had lost the battle–exactly as it had planned.
The entire electronic
global community had been fooled… or so it seemed.
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