Chapter 186
Translator: Dreamscribe
Silence settled over the lab.
"For now...."
Seo-ha opened his mouth cautiously. The researchers pricked up their ears.
"You've all worked very hard."
It was hard to tell whether it was praise or consolation. Hyung-joo's eyebrow twitched.
Seo-ha closed the documents and gazed up at the ceiling for a moment. His eyes seemed to be looking somewhere far away. Theo quietly unfolded his arms and, looking at Seo-ha, spoke.
"Just say it."
Seo-ha's gaze wavered.
"Still...."
"It's fine. No matter how much feedback we gave, it was something we could never fix. Honestly, you need to say it so the lab can set the right direction."
He weighed it.
Because looking at the proposal, he had grown certain. The system these people had built was not that of a mathematician. Perhaps cryptographers and engineers shared the same way of thinking, in that mathematics itself was not the goal. The logic that as long as the result was good, it didn't matter how one got there.
'It's not as if that's wrong.'
A cipher, so long as it isn't broken, has achieved its purpose.
It had passed through many hands. Attack and defense, a structure designed thoroughly to fit that purpose. They were choices with reasonable justifications, and each judgment had its own plausible logic.
But the thing that resulted from all of it piling up was a patchwork rag, with cement slathered on wherever a crack showed. Seo-ha, on a visceral level, simply could not accept this.
"This cipher isn't as solid as it looks."
So he spoke in a language they could understand.
At the unexpected response, the researchers' eyes went round. LWE was a system whose efficiency and stability had already been verified.
Someone raised a hand and spoke.
"Not solid.... What do you mean by that?"
"The stability of LWE is grounded in the difficulty of the Shortest Vector Problem. There's no way you could break this easily, is there?"
"Right. Why would this not be secure?"
A murmur spread through the lab.
But Seo-ha's words were no lie. He could see it. The route by which this cipher could be neutralized.
"It'll probably be faster to just show you directly. You have a sample with the cipher implemented, don't you?"
"W-we do!"
Hyung-joo scrambled off and opened the terminal of a workstation on one side of the lab. A welcome greeting the researchers had built pulling all-nighters.
Swish.
Seo-ha rose from his seat and stood before the workstation. He peered at the screen for a moment, then nodded.
"Could I get a board, please?"
Ben had already dragged over a large board. Seo-ha uncapped a marker and began writing out equations.
It went without saying, but this cipher was still unfinished. If it were patched up properly, then even Seo-ha wouldn't be able to bring it down easily.
'So it has to be now.'
He didn't want to resort to crude methods, but seeing the researchers who held such absolute confidence in their creation, it seemed there was no other way.
Scribble.
The equations, which had started in a corner of the board, gradually expanded their territory. The first to grasp the crux of it was Theo, who had spent the longest years alongside Seo-ha.
"Huh?"
His expression turned to shock, and he looked at Seo-ha with a stunned gaze.
'He must really not like that cipher.'
"Theo, that's...."
Su-jeong slipped over and whispered to him.
"Yeah, that's right."
Then Sri, Cecilia, and Ben each grasped Seo-ha's intent in turn, one by one.
Seo-ha was not decrypting the cipher. He was reverse-tracing the very principle behind the generation of the noise used in the encryption process.
"Ah, I see!"
Come to think of it, Seo-ha was a mathematician who had studied chaos more deeply than anyone.
True randomness is ten thousand times harder to implement than perfect order. So the noise they had layered on countless times to conceal the truth was, by that very count, leaving behind that many mathematical fingerprints.
"The Paradox of Overdesign."
Cecilia muttered under her breath.
It refers to the phenomenon where the constraints added to strengthen security paradoxically narrow the space in which an answer can exist.
Having filled the board with equations, Seo-ha nodded as though satisfied.
"Sri! Make a filter out of this, please."
"Got it. I'll code it right away."
Sri opened his laptop and began converting the equations Seo-ha had written into algorithms. Green characters poured down the screen like a downpour.
Clatter-clatter-clack-
"Theo and Su-jeong-noona, could you pull just five hundred sample ciphertexts? Ones with different structures."
"Which segment?"
"Ones with a different key-generation stage. The fingerprint changes every time the noise seed changes, so we need cross-validation."
Theo was already moving to another station. Su-jeong followed behind him and said,
"A hundred and twenty-five each from parameter sets A through D should do it."
"Okay."
"Cecilia, help me with the geometric mapping of the phase. We need to correct the projection angle so the framework hidden beneath the noise doesn't look distorted."
"That's my specialty. Leave it to me."
With an elegant motion of her hand, Cecilia began visualizing the nonlinear functions written on the board as a geometric model.
"Ben, distribute the server resources across thirty-two nodes, please. If we push everything through the filter at once, it could overload. You know computational precision is what matters for noise stripping, right?"
Ben shrugged and adjusted his headset.
"Already done splitting it. Just say the word, anytime."
It was work they had always done.
Team Apex demonstrated its finest ability when assisting Seo-ha. Each of them knew their role clearly and moved according to the conductor's intent. Hyung-joo stared blankly at the board, then belatedly realized that goosebumps had risen on his arms.
'What in the world is happening?'
He couldn't quite tell, but the atmosphere was that of something, something deeply shocking, about to happen.
Time passed.
Ten minutes.
Twenty minutes.
Joseph, who had been standing in a corner with his arms folded, slid over to the side and struck up a conversation.
"What do you think, Luca?"
They were researchers who had come from the NSA. Spies, so to speak, planted by the agency, doubling as liaisons.
"These Koreans are pretty good too. It doesn't reach Kyber, but it's a considerably decent-level cipher. I'd wager they'd been researching it in advance."
Luca, a curly-haired Latino man, spoke as he adjusted his glasses.
"Looks like he's trying to break the cipher right now?"
"I figured Seo-ha would hate this. You saw the report too."
Joseph nodded.
According to the report, Seo-ha had a tendency to fixate obsessively on mathematical order. To him, an LWE-style cipher must have felt like torture. But disliking something and breaking it are two separate matters.
"So you think he'll fail?"
"Obviously. It doesn't make sense probabilistically. The advantage of LWE is that there's almost no room for luck to intervene. With RSA, if you're unlucky, you might occasionally stumble onto a prime factor, but."
"Doesn't it look like he's trying to remove the noise?"
Luca gestured at the screen with his chin.
"It sounds plausible, but it's impossible. That's no different from saying he'll figure out the seed of a random number generator. If that were possible, LWE itself wouldn't hold together."
Joseph stopped talking and looked at the workstation screen. The endlessly streaming code and calculation logs.
"There's no way he wouldn't know that, so why...."
Team Apex was not stupid.
Over the past four weeks, Joseph had felt to the bone just how brilliant these geniuses were. Monsters who caught up on subjects he had spent years researching in a mere few days, then overlaid their own interpretations on top. And they were moving at the wave of Seo-ha's hand. With faces that held not a shred of doubt.
Seo-ha stared at the data pouring down the screen like a downpour.
A flood of numbers, layered over and over with artificial noise, in which the human eye could never read a pattern. But to Seo-ha, who had glimpsed the true chaos of the universe within the zeros of the Riemann Zeta Function and the distribution of primes, it looked entirely different.
'Heh heh heh. To think they made this and called it chaos. How funny.'
Seo-ha brought his fingers to his temple and quieted Ducky. But his thought was correct. Artificially injected noise can never become perfect chaos.
Chaos made by nature has no purpose. It simply exists as it is. That very purposelessness is the essence of randomness.
'But this is different.'
Someone had designed this with a purpose. If there is intent, then preference arises, and if so, then naturally there also exist regions one wishes to avoid. Segments where the computation grows complex, boundaries where collisions readily occur, cases handled as exceptions during the verification process.
They were traces that ordinary people could never see, but Seo-ha was a highly exceptional being. After a long while, he opened his mouth.
"Everyone, did you know? True chaos is exceedingly beautiful."
Seo-ha still vividly remembered the chaos he had seen in the Quantum Chaos experiment.
While the researchers tilted their heads, all the preparations were complete.
"The filter's finished."
"Projection correction complete."
Seo-ha slowly lifted his head.
"There's a bias in this cipher's noise."
One researcher stood up, bristling.
"A bias? We used an algorithm to make the random numbers as unpredictable as possible...."
Tap-
Seo-ha stepped up to the workstation and applied the filter Sri had made to the cipher. The noise waveforms that had been scattered chaotically across the screen transformed and appeared as a three-dimensional geometric structure.
"Huh?"
"Th-that...!"
It was just as Seo-ha had said.
The waveform of the random numbers, which should have spread out forming a perfect sphere, was subtly warped around a certain axis.
"If you analyze this bias and reverse-trace it, the range in which an answer can exist narrows exponentially."
Tap-
Each time a filter was added, the number of cases, which had been near infinite, was sheared away in chunks.
The enormous search space of over ten to the hundredth power shrank to less than half in an instant.
Tap-
Half again, and then the random numbers narrowed down to the tens of thousands, the thousands.
That overwhelming insight, which had drawn out the spectrum hidden within the chaos of the primes, thoroughly stripped bare the naked face of the fake chaos made by humans.
Luca's and Joseph's eyes grew as though they would pop out.
"No way! He's finding and filtering out a bias in the random numbers that fine?"
"He interpreted the noise as a geometric distortion of space."
The elite Korean and American researchers watched that marvelous dismantling show unable even to breathe properly.
'Ah! How refreshing!'
Seo-ha was in a good mood.
A colossal castle of garbage crumbled away one piece at a time. It was a bracing feeling, like wiping clean a window on which dust had long gathered.
And at last, the true skeleton of the cipher, which they had so desperately tried to hide, revealed its shabby form dead center on the screen.
In a span of not even two hours.
"H-how can this be."
A groan like a lament leaked from Hyung-joo's lips.
He had pulled all-nighters deliberating with scholars. The cipher system that, by their calculations, they had believed would hold even against the attack of a quantum computer had been shattered in vain by a single human. He felt fear that went beyond awe.
'Naturally.'
Theo looked around.
The researchers were staring back and forth between the monitor and Seo-ha's face, their jaws hanging as though about to fall off.
Engineering patchwork, forcibly stitched together in pursuit of results alone, can never survive before Seo-ha's mathematics, which sees straight through structure.
'It's just like an execution.'
Seo-ha had swung the blade of mathematics and cleaved in two the beliefs they had held.
"An LWE stripped of its impurities is, in the end, nothing more than a very simple system of linear equations."
Tap.
The final equation was entered at Seo-ha's fingertips.
At that, the intricately tangled labyrinth of polynomials unfolded in a single stroke, and the encrypted answer was output.
[Welcome to Apex Lab, KOREA]
In a stillness where not even the sound of breathing could be heard, Seo-ha smiled brightly and said,
"Thank you! I'm really glad to meet you all too."
"...."
"...."
He put on a deliberately sorrowful expression.
"I'm truly sorry it turned out this way. It seems we'll have no choice but to build it anew. Would it be all right if I started over from scratch, in the way I want?"
'Demon!'
The researchers wore heartbroken expressions.
The Apex team members sincerely pitied them.
*****
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