Chapter 183
Translator: Dreamscribe
The winter weather in Waterloo was so changeable it defied prediction.
Cold air descending from the Arctic met the vast Great Lakes and turned into clouds heavy with snow. Roads that had been perfectly fine the day before being paralyzed by waist-high snow was practically an everyday occurrence.
People bundled up in thick padded coats, gloves, and scarves trudged through the snow with practiced expressions. Every time Damian saw the snow piled up soft and deep, he found himself recalling his childhood.
"Dad!"
His own voice as a boy.
On days when too much snow had fallen to go outside, his father would always sit at his workbench, tinkering with something. A tray full of small parts, a set of precision tools and screwdrivers, and the faint smell of oil that always lingered. To Damian, that was the cherished scent of his father.
"What is it, little knight?"
He asked, turning to look back.
A book lay open on Damian's lap. On one side of the page was a strange machine printed in black and white. Rows of alphabet keys lined up like piano keys, and densely packed light bulbs, were visible. The most fascinating thing of all was the gears turning intricately inside the box.
"What's this?"
"Ah, that?"
He gave his son a playful smile.
"It's a cipher machine called Enigma. The German army used it during World War II...."
He stopped, then lowered himself down. And as if passing on a secret, he whispered in a low voice.
"This was the hardest cipher in the world to crack. People believed that messages made with this machine could never be deciphered."
Young Damian's eyes went round.
"Never?"
"Yeah, back then."
Damian couldn't take his eyes off the photo.
His father gave a soft chuckle, took out a sheet of paper, and began drawing some simple lines.
"Here, look. The principle is very simple."
By modern standards, the Enigma was nothing more than a machine with an ordinary switch structure.
But analyzing some 150 trillion possible combinations, 150 million times a million, without the help of a computer was impossible with the technology of the time.
"So who was it that cracked it?"
"That's the most interesting part. There was a man named Alan Turing...."
In an instant, he was swept up in the story his father was telling.
It was the moment Damian became captivated by the labyrinth that was cryptography. The year he turned ten, with the help of his engineer father, he built a device that addressed the Enigma's weakness.
Click.
He pressed the button on the box sitting on his desk.
Along with the sound of gears turning, a small bulb lit up.
Krrrk-
The original Enigma had a fixed reflector. As a result, there was exactly one thing it could not do. Namely, returning a letter back to itself. It had created an absolute rule that no matter which letter was pressed, the same letter could never come out as the result.
Turing burrowed into this trivial little crack and brought the Enigma down.
Krrk-krrk-
Even as the years passed, cryptography remained the game he loved most.
Even a technology once called the absolute shield of an era would eventually reveal its flaws as time went on. Someone would burrow into that gap, and someone else would build a device to patch it. Like a chase that would never end. And the dream he had held since childhood was to become the ultimate winner of this thrilling game.
"Kyber doesn't have any flaws."
Damian muttered, watching the spinning clockwork.
Knock knock!
"Come in."
"Am I interrupting?"
"Not at all."
The professor looked down for a moment at the modified Enigma on the desk, then pulled up a chair and sat across from him.
Damian's gaze turned to the newspaper in the professor's hand.
[Team Apex, Solvers of the Riemann Hypothesis, Head to Korea with Yu Seo-ha. Reportedly to Research Next-Generation Post-Quantum Cryptography]
Damian's eyes narrowed.
"Looks like MIT made a move. I thought they had no real interest in cryptography."
"I guess the rumors were true."
Anyone who studied mathematics owned Yu Seo-ha's paper on the Riemann Hypothesis.
An extremely difficult paper. But that was precisely why it set the spirit of challenge ablaze. Much like the reason climbers traveled all the way to Nepal to scale the Himalayas, perhaps.
Even in Waterloo's math department, students could often be seen running highlighters across Seo-ha's paper. Not over the parts they understood, but over the lines they hoped to understand someday.
"Aren't you worried?"
Clack-clack-
Instead of answering, Damian lightly tapped the keys of the Enigma on the desk. A bulb blinked, displaying the encrypted letters.
[NO PROBLEM]
"Yu Seo-ha's paper is remarkably beautiful. I could feel an almost obsessive drive toward order in it. But cryptography isn't that kind of world."
He nodded as if agreeing with Damian's words.
Professor Michele was a renowned mathematician and the designer of SIKE. SIKE was an isogeny-based cipher, distinguished by overwhelming efficiency and an elegant mathematical structure compared to the other PQC candidates. Ironically, that was also the very reason Damian had been able to break it.
To solve SIKE's maze, one had to find a path through multidimensional space. But Damian used a lemma to lift the problem into a higher dimension, then straightened the tangled maze into a single line.
A problem that supposedly would have taken hundreds of years to solve even with tens of thousands of CPU cores, he had reduced, through sheer mathematical intuition, to the computational load of a single household laptop.
'A shame, truly. Such a waste of talent.'
What if he hadn't fallen for the Enigma as a child? What if, like Yu Seo-ha, he had spent his time playing with the Four Color Theorem?
Perhaps the mathematical world might have gained two great intellects at once. Like Newton and Leibniz.
But Damian's interest lay solely in cryptography. The only reason he had studied mathematics at all was that he needed it to build more efficient, more powerful ciphers.
And yet even that alone made Damian brilliant enough to rival the greatest mathematicians of the age. Yu Seo-ha's paper, which most reviewers had taken weeks to read in full. Damian had devoured it in just three days.
"Fundamentally, the more mathematically perfect a cryptographic system is, the weaker it becomes. The logical cause and effect are so clear that they end up serving as signposts for the attacker as well.
People who prize mathematical order can never escape the temptation of linearity. That's surely something you know well yourself, Professor."
Professor Michele gave a wry smile.
Perfect linearity and symmetrical beauty, the integrity of a logic that allowed no rebuttal. Seo-ha's mathematics was too beautiful. And for precisely that same reason, it would be broken.
"I intend to shatter whatever cipher he builds with everything I have. And then he too will come to understand. That there exists in this world a void that can never be calculated."
The professor looked puzzled.
"Is there any need for that? Focusing on Kyber alone should be more than enough."
Damian said with a mischievous smile.
"I'm going to send the genius back to where he was always meant to be. I believe this is how I can contribute to the world as a cryptographer."
* * *
Near the foot of a low mountain on the outskirts of Daejeon stood a building ringed by a tight cordon of security personnel.
The building had originally been designed as a secure facility for the Agency for Defense Development (ADD). But just before completion, its sign had abruptly changed.
[Apex Lab KOREA]
"Wow, you can really tell this is a military facility. So this is where Seo-ha is going to 'serve'."
An exterior that called to mind a secret laboratory.
Cecilia, carrying a large box of belongings, gazed up at the building's outer walls in admiration. Behind her, Theo and Su-jeong, along with Sri and Ben, were bustling about gathering their respective equipment.
They would be living together in a detached house in downtown Daejeon. Morris, the butler of House Ashley, had come over to Korea ahead of time and was already preparing the space where the head of the family would stay.
Hsssh-
As the massive security door rose, the interior of the lab came into view.
A cutting-edge facility revealed its splendor, as if the Apex Lab at MIT had been transplanted exactly as requested, no, on an even more colossal scale.
"These are the very latest servers!"
Eyes shining, Sri dashed toward the server racks in the center of the main hall.
After briefly looking around the lab, the team members made their way to the conference room. There, all the personnel from both Korea and the United States who had been waiting for them had gathered.
'So those are Team Apex....'
'They look way too young, don't they?'
'It really is red hair. No way! He's way more handsome than in the photos.'
'Why is everyone so good-looking? There was a rumor they judge looks in the test too, is that actually true?'
'The Countess is lovely. And Su-jeong's grown up well too.'
In the eyes of those in their crisply pressed white lab coats, tension and anticipation showed at once.
The Korean government meant to use this opportunity to create as broad a venue for exchange as possible.
When the recruitment notice for collaborating with Team Apex went up, South Korea's scientific community was thrown into an absolute uproar. The team that had proven the problem of the century. Who wouldn't want a place here? These were the elite, chosen after beating odds of more than a hundred to one.
Gulp.
Park Hyung-joo, a teaching assistant and the self-proclaimed genius of Nowon District, was one of them too.
As a cryptography expert, how could he let a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity like this slip by? Professor Kim Ji-yoon had readily given her blessing.
'Which one's the rumored supporter?'
Beyond Seo-ha, all sorts of rumors swirled among the members of Team Apex.
For instance, Theodore Langford, the lab's second-in-command, was said to look down with contempt on anyone who failed to meet his standards, as though they were trash.
There were also rumors that Su-jeong's main job was actually making coffee, and that Srinivasa Krishnan was a cold-blooded man who cared about nothing but money.
And then there was the supporter in question, or rather, the utility man.
Hyung-joo's gaze turned toward Ben.
He had heard Ben was the only one in the lab who had gotten in without taking the test. The accepted explanation was that it came down to his exceptional knack for cleaning up after others.
In the past he had been a fairly well-known prodigy, but now he was a fixer who tidied up the messes the other members left strewn behind them. So it was hardly surprising that everyone was thinking the same thing.
'Couldn't I shove him aside and take his place?'
'When it comes to cleaning up after people, I'm second to none either.'
Ben caught the meaning of the looks aimed his way and gave a faintly sardonic smile.
Theo glanced at his watch and stepped forward.
"Pleased to meet you all. My name is Theodore Langford. Our team doesn't deal in cryptography professionally, so we're short on experience. That's why we'll be learning a great deal from all of you going forward."
At a greeting far more humble than expected, smiles spread across everyone's faces. But the words that followed plunged the conference room into silence.
"Which means, over the next four weeks, please pass everything you know along to us."
It was a declaration that they would absorb it all, from the fundamentals of cryptography to modern post-quantum cryptography, in a single month.
The other team members stood beside him with expressions that said this was only natural. The remark was born of all the experience they had picked up studying other fields alongside Seo-ha, but it lacked tact, that much was true.
'Isn't that awfully arrogant?'
'They ought to at least say something that makes sense.'
An intellectual arrogance they couldn't hide came showing through. The researchers each quietly clenched their teeth.
'Try it, if you think you can.'
'They've had a little success and now they look down on cryptography? I'll have them bawling their eyes out within days.'
And so the first seminar began.
Hyung-joo stepped up to the whiteboard. In truth, he was carrying complicated feelings inside. The thrill of working alongside the stars of the mathematical world coexisted with a desire, on the other hand, to teach them a lesson.
He gave his head a rough shake.
'This is a chance, so let's do it properly.'
Hyung-joo resolved to show them the very essence of cryptography. But....
"Uh, hmm. This Gaussian noise distribution is a little too honest. It's way too easy compared to the random numbers we've worked with."
"If you twist the tail of the distribution with this formula, the attacker won't be able to predict the path probabilistically, will they? I'm going to try applying an infinite series; want to take a look?"
"About that threshold-setting method, let's apply the nonlinear approach we came up with earlier in minimum-energy theory. Ben, go ahead and run it right now."
The faces of the Korean and American elite gathered in the conference room turned pale.
It was hardly a surprise.
All that had happened was that the spice of cryptography had been sprinkled on top of the enormous mathematical foundation they already possessed.
Hyung-joo had prepared dozens of pages of material to explain the intricacies of lattice-based cryptography, but Team Apex had already arrived somewhere beyond the conclusion before he had even finished writing out the formula.
"Please hurry. We don't have much time."
"Sorry?"
At Theo's prodding, Hyung-joo gave a blank look.
"Seo-ha's coming. In four weeks! We have to stack up as much as we possibly can before then. Once Seo-ha starts designing ciphers, keeping up is going to be a struggle."
"When it looks like he doesn't get something, he just blinks at you like a deer and stares."
"Right! That look that says, 'Huh? You don't even know this?'"
"I really don't want that face pointed at me. Come on, everyone, faster, more!"
They were all desperate too.
*****
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