Chapter 179
Translator: Dreamscribe
Professor Kim Ji-yoon was in a hurry.
Clack, clack.
The sound of her shoes down the hallway was a beat faster than usual. She had been to this building many times, but never had her heart raced the way it did today.
It had been three days ago that she requested a meeting with the Minister. To the secretary who asked what it concerned, she answered briefly.
"The future of the nation depends on it."
The secretary laughed, as if to say she shouldn't joke around, but she couldn't bring herself to laugh along. Unfortunately, this was no exaggeration at all.
Creak-
The door opened.
Lee Hyun-seok, the Minister of Science and ICT, rose from the sofa and extended his hand. A bureaucrat's face, mid-fifties. He was a man who, though gentle, radiated busyness with his whole body.
"Professor, it's been a while. Please, have a seat."
The moment Ji-yoon sat down, she pulled a tablet from her bag.
"You're a busy man, so I'll keep this brief and get straight to the point."
"By all means."
She showed the Minister a New York Times article she had prepared.
[NASDAQ, Cybersecurity and Post-Quantum Cryptography Stocks Surge. Banking Sector Declares Full Overhaul of Security Infrastructure]
[U.S. Government, "We Will Make the Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography a Top National Priority."]
"I've been briefed on this as well. But is it really urgent enough to require a private meeting with the Minister of Science and ICT right now?"
Ji-yoon struck her chest as if in frustration.
"We need to prepare for a cryptographic standards war at the national level, and we need to do it right now."
The Minister furrowed his brow as he looked at her.
"Post-Quantum Cryptography. You mean PQC? NIST (the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology) has already...."
"No!"
Ji-yoon cut him off.
"I apologize. But there's no time. The NIST standards aren't perfect. They were finalized before Seo-ha's theory came out. Which means they too will have to start over from a zero base."
She pulled documents from an envelope and spread them out. Dense formulas and diagrams.
As a cryptographer, Ji-yoon had attended conferences held all over the world. The conclusion she had drawn from them was a single one. No organization or nation anywhere had a clear blueprint for next-generation PQC. And at the time, everyone had taken this for granted, because they believed the transition to a new standard was a future that wouldn't arrive for decades.
"RSA encryption has been handed a death sentence. Seo-ha finished it off. Modern cryptographic systems are going to die, and in the not-so-distant future at that. This is a settled future."
The Minister's eyes went round. Then he burst out laughing.
"Hahaha! Now you're overstating it. I received a report too. They told me Seo-ha's paper might advance cryptanalysis somewhat, but that it isn't an immediate danger."
She sighed and shook her head.
"I don't know who the staffer was who filed that report, but I can say with certainty that he is no mathematician."
At her ice-cold voice, the Minister's laughter slowly died away.
"The report probably said something like this, didn't it? 'Just because the Riemann Hypothesis has been solved does not mean the cryptographic system will collapse anytime soon'."
Gulp.
The Minister nodded.
"By the standards of the past, that would be correct. But the geometric space and the Hamiltonian operator that Seo-ha created are something else entirely."
Ji-yoon pointed to a page among the documents on the table, one covered in complex formulas.
"This operator reads the waves of the prime numbers. Which is to say, it can dramatically narrow the spectrum of the zero distribution. Germany's LRZ supercomputer has already proven the power this thing holds.
The time it would take to optimize these formulas into a decryption algorithm? Ten years at the most. And if the world's geniuses set their minds to it and threw themselves at the problem, it would be far shorter than that."
"Th-then."
"Quite literally, RSA has already drawn its last breath. Every national system in the world right now is standing on top of a corpse."
The Minister's face went pale.
"You mean the 2048-bit encryption that was supposed to take hundreds of millions of years to crack could be broken? Before quantum computers are even finished?"
Ji-yoon smiled and drove the point home.
"NSA headquarters is probably a house in mourning right now. Their most sensitive military networks could be hacked. They're in no position to pick and choose, are they? They might drag in even the PQC that's still taking its first baby steps and use it as a stopgap, right away. Even if it means pouring in thousands of trillions of won."
The Minister swallowed hard and leaned forward.
"What's the real reason you came to me, Professor? You surely didn't come simply to deliver a warning."
Ji-yoon's eyes flashed sharply.
"It's a chance to break free from dependence."
"Dependence?"
"Up until now the Republic of Korea, no, every nation except the United States, has had to use the standards handed down by NIST. Defense, finance, telecommunications, not a single one was an exception. Even so, it was bearable, in its own way."
Mmh.
The Minister nodded.
"RSA was free."
"Exactly. RSA's core patents expired in the early 2000s. The foundational patent that MIT had held passed into the public domain. It was a fine cryptographic system. Prime factorization is mathematically simple, so it was easy to implement even on older CPUs."
"So that's why everything from smartphones to public certificates ran on RSA."
"But PQC is different."
She swiped to the next screen on the tablet.
"Lattice-based cryptography, code-based cryptography, multivariate cryptography. The leading PQC candidates right now differ from RSA in their very mathematical structure. The computations are incomparably more complex. To achieve the same level of security, the resources required could be hundreds of times greater. Which means, in short..."
She raised her index finger.
"...it means dedicated hardware chips will be necessary. Every device in the world that needs encryption. How big do you think that market would be?"
Ji-yoon went on.
"And that's not all. Once someone holds the standard, products have to be built on top of that design foundation, so there's no getting around the patents. This is a different order of thing entirely from when RSA was free. For decades to come, perhaps even more than a century!"
She looked the Minister straight in the eye and said,
"It will become a structure in which the entire world pays royalties to whichever nation holds the standard."
The Minister rose from his seat and walked to the window.
In the span of ten minutes, his face had aged several years.
"Right now the United States would be the most likely, wouldn't it?"
"Because it's the country that has spent the most on PQC."
"So we'll have to grovel and stand in line again. We can't exactly produce PQC overnight. What's the situation in the other countries?"
Ji-yoon showed him the documents.
"The EU is already pouring an enormous budget into research for its own independent standard. China hasn't disclosed anything, but I hear it's been recalling its cryptography experts who were abroad, one after another."
The Minister slowly turned around.
"Then what on earth are we supposed to do? There's no way we could secure a budget on the level of the U.S., China, or the EU!"
Ji-yoon took a moment to catch her breath before answering.
She had spent three days preparing for this one sentence.
"Minister, the Republic of Korea possesses the single most important element for winning this fight."
"We have something like that?"
"Because we are a Yu Seo-ha-possessing state. [TL: 보유국 ("possessing state") deliberately echoes the Korean term for a nuclear-weapons state, framing Seo-ha as a strategic national asset.]
Seo-ha smashed RSA all on his own. In cryptography, the sharpest spear is also the sturdiest shield, because attack and defense share the same mathematical foundation."
"W-wait a minute! Seo-ha belongs to MIT. Is there any chance he might develop the cryptography for the United States?"
"Every chance. Which is precisely why I asked to see you so urgently."
"So, it isn't as if there's no way out after all!"
The Minister put a hand to his chin and paced restlessly around the room. And just as he was about to speak, as if he'd made up his mind, Ji-yoon raised her hand to stop him.
"If by any chance you're thinking of slotting Seo-ha into a defense contractor and working him to the bone as alternative military service, I'd drop the idea."
A guilty look crossed the Minister's face.
Ji-yoon knew all too well how the state treated its scientists. Talent that hadn't yet completed military service made an especially easy target for the state to handle.
"Because if we approach Seo-ha that way, we'll lose even the only card we hold. You're a smart man, so think it through with your own head. What kind of offers do you suppose the other nations will put to Seo-ha? And we're going to threaten him?
Please, do not force Seo-ha into choosing American citizenship."
The most cost-effective solution that had occurred to a man who had spent his entire life as a bureaucrat.
The Minister's face flushed red.
"...My thinking was shortsighted. You're right, Professor."
With a weary expression, the Minister roughly loosened his tie. Now was not the time to be thinking about his own legacy.
"In that case, how should we approach him?"
"Propose a fair partnership. You'll have to promise complete autonomy, full and unstinting support, and an ownership stake in the rights to the resulting patents. Honestly, even that won't be enough. You'll need a great deal more on top of it."
The Minister's mouth fell open.
"An ownership stake, even? Has there ever been such a case in a national project?"
"I've said what I came to say. That's for the higher-ups to gather and discuss. But before you make the offer, please remember just this one thing."
She looked the Minister straight in the eye and said,
"If you try to lean on patriotism, you'll fail."
How had the United States come to lead the world in technology?
It was because the country did not exploit its geniuses. The United States, for instance, would make Seo-ha an offer like this.
They'd tell him to start a company, and they'd cover whatever funding he needed. They'd tell him the state itself would become his biggest customer.
Palantir had become the leader in the global security-data industry in exactly this manner.
'What kind of offer can you people make to Seo-ha?'
The Minister paced anxiously, then picked up the phone and arranged a meeting with the President. Ji-yoon watched him for a while, then slipped out of the office.
* * *
In Korea, the news poured out day after day. It was because the Minister had made such a loud, sweeping move.
[Emergency Analysis, Riemann Hypothesis Proof Looking Likely! Is the Balance in My Bank Account Safe?]
[The Teenage Mathematician Who Toppled the World's Digital Ecosystem with a Single Pen, Yu Seo-ha]
Network and cable alike, every broadcaster scheduled emergency programming.
Mathematicians, cryptographers, IT security experts, even economists had been summoned into the studios, breaking into a sweat as they tried to explain the situation.
"...And so there's no need for you viewers to worry too much. Encryption being neutralized? I'm telling you, that's not such an easy thing to pull off."
"Professor, you're in computer science.... This is a math problem. It's a certainty that RSA is going to collapse soon. I've already converted every bit of money in my account into physical gold."
"But does Yu Seo-ha truly bear no responsibility for this situation?"
"You want to hold a scholar who discovered a law of nature responsible? In that case I suppose every fatal fall is the fault of Newton, who discovered universal gravitation."
"Why are you talking like that? Are you trying to start a fight?"
On screen, images of Seo-ha that had trickled out here and there over time were broadcast on repeat.
A shot of him lost in thought, a piece of chalk in hand, standing before a large blackboard.
His face still hadn't lost its boyish look. Yet the fact that the proof he had achieved was shaking the entire world struck the public as a fresh shock.
└So that means my overdraft balance could get reset to zero too? Praise Yu Seo-ha!
└nah nah, the hacker's gonna tack one more zero onto your loan ᄏᄏᄏ
└This is honestly like something out of a movie. Where'd the guy who said the proof was BS go?
└A movie? Then let's make the genre apocalypse.
└If the nuclear missile launch codes get cracked, it really might be ᄏᄏᄏᄏ
At the same time, MIT.
Whether or not he knew the world was locked in heated debate over him, the air inside Apex Lab was nothing short of peaceful.
The people who had been brought in were carrying out their duties splendidly. Seo-ha was so absorbed in writing the textbook, finding it far too much fun, that he lost all track of time.
But the peace lasted only a moment.
People of various ethnicities, dressed in black suits, began to arrive at MIT one after another.
*****
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