Chapter 189
Translator: Dreamscribe
The next morning.
Woo-hyun came into the office two hours later than usual. His assistant held out a cup of coffee along with a phone. On the screen were headline articles from various web portals.
[Shin Woo-hyun's Mad 8-Hour EBS Lecture on the Riemann Hypothesis]
[What Was Behind the Top-Ranked Tutor's Tears?]
[Yu Seo-ha's Verified Chat Goes Viral, "Shin Woo-hyun Is My Teacher".]
"Sir, interview requests are pouring in. Five broadcasting stations, and I gave up counting the online outlets. There are also offers from talk shows and educational programs."
Woo-hyun glanced at the screen and shook his head.
"Turn them all down."
The assistant asked back with a startled look.
"All of them?"
"Yes. And cancel the meeting this afternoon too."
"What?"
Woo-hyun hurried into his office.
The assistant didn't ask anything further.
It was because the assistant knew that once Woo-hyun made a decision, he never reversed it. Woo-hyun went into his office and lowered the blinds.
Step, step.
He walked into the far corner and pulled out a box, thick with dust, from deep inside a cabinet. Then he swallowed hard once and slowly opened it.
Sliiide.
What came out of it was a thick bundle of paper.
It was the unfinished paper he'd been researching before he left graduate school. It was old, its cover yellowed, coffee stains bleeding here and there.
The thing that had once earned him the title of Princeton's rising star, and the thing he'd never managed to finish before shoving it into his bag and coming home.
He couldn't bring himself to throw it away. But he didn't want to look at it either. So he hadn't even kept it at home; he'd buried it in a corner of his office.
Because every time he saw it, it stabbed at his heart like an awl. But now it was different.
Flutter.
He slowly turned the pages.
The sharp handwriting of his younger years filled the paper.
'This is where I got stuck.'
Around page twenty, a string of question marks was scrawled in the margin. Below them were traces of several approaches he'd tried and then erased. Looking at those marks that showed just how lost he'd been back then, Woo-hyun gave a bitter smile.
Scratch scratch.
Everything he'd built up over two months of wrestling with Seo-ha's paper flowed out from his fingertips. When he looked at the paper through the language of Yu-Riemann Geometry, the point where he'd been stuck more than a decade ago looked completely different. Woo-hyun leaned back in his chair and tilted his body backward.
'How strange.'
It didn't hurt. If anything, an energy that told him he could do this surged up from within.
Torn and crumpled paper. He'd carefully taped it back together. It felt agonizing, like it showed him an unfiltered image of himself in those despairing days. But unlike before, it was bearable.
'What good is it now...?'
Still, he couldn't suppress his curiosity. At the very least, he wanted to know what lay beyond this point.
'Was it a meaningful struggle after all?'
Woo-hyun picked up a pencil. And beside the question marks, he slowly began to develop an equation.
One line, two lines.
His hand grew faster. The coffee had gone cold.
Knock knock!
"Sir, what would you like to do about lunch?"
"......"
No answer.
Sensing something was off, the assistant cracked the door open. Several sheets of paper were scattered across the office floor. Woo-hyun sat hunched over his desk, writing something. It was a face utterly unlike his usual self. It wasn't the look of a man composing problems with a businesslike expression.
Creak-
The assistant quietly closed the door and left.
***
[Regular Report]
To: NSA Senior Researcher David
-It's been three months since I came to Korea. Korea is a rather nice place to live. The cafeteria serves food that's astonishingly healthy and delicious every single day. I want to go home soon, but I think I'll miss the food here terribly.
There have been some unusual developments in Seo-ha's activities lately.
This isn't in the report, but apparently he's been spotted playing the piano quite often. He's better than I expected, which took me by surprise too.
The cipher development ran into considerable chaos in the early stages.
Only natural, I suppose. What researcher could gracefully accept being told to redesign everything from scratch? There were practical reasons as well.
Not many people properly understood Yu-Riemann Geometry. Seo-ha didn't force the matter. He simply said this.
"Then would you all mind taking on the red team?"
I'll be honest. My pride was pretty wounded.
Being excluded from the cipher design and told to handle the attacking side was, however plausible the justification, a way of dismissing us.
The senior researcher on the Korean side raised his hand and asked.
"And what happens if we break it?"
Seo-ha hesitated for a moment, then answered like this.
"Why don't you tell me what you'd like? I'll do my best to accommodate it within my power."
The researchers glanced around at one another, then spoke up one by one.
"Even asking to join Apex Lab as a team member?"
"You'll return to the States once your three years of service are up, right? I'd like to move with you when you do."
Everyone seemed to feel more or less the same. This is certainly a workplace with plenty of appeal. The biggest draw, of course, is a guaranteed career.
Seo-ha looked flustered, but Theo, standing beside him, smiled and said.
"A talent who's broken a cipher Seo-ha made? I'd absolutely love to work with you formally."
But the faces of team members like Su-jeong and Ben were peculiar. That look of, why are you entertaining such a pointless idea? They seemed to believe such a thing could never possibly happen.
Here's the astonishing part.
Seo-ha disclosed the entire algorithm of the cipher he and his team members had designed together. What he said was a masterpiece.
"You have to understand it first before you can break it."
David.
It took us a whole week just to understand the principle of this cipher. Us, cryptographers.
In Yu-Riemann Geometry, space rests upon the operations of a noncommutative group. Every time the curvature changes, the operational path changes, and when the path changes, so does the geodesic, the shortest path in this space.
No matter which path an attacker chooses, that path leads into a space of different curvature, and there another noncommutative operation lies in wait.
It's like a maze whose structure shifts with every step, which gives me the chills. Still, it feels like we've gotten a bit of a thread to follow, so I'm hopeful. I'll be in touch again soon.
P.S. Luca might not be as trustworthy an agent as we think. I caught him cornering Srinivasa and grilling him in detail about Team Apex's benefits and salary.
***
[Report on Tier Zero and Cipher Development Trends]
To: NSA Senior Researcher David
-David, it's been a while. Quite some time has passed since my last report. I'd like to blame it on being busy, but the truth is closer to not knowing what to write.
What happened, you ask?
It started when Seo-ha brought a computer into the lobby and set it down. The cipher was up on the screen. There was a sticky note attached below the monitor.
[I'll offer a contract to the first person who breaks it. You're welcome to form a team.]
It was Seo-ha's handwriting.
David, everyone pulled out their phones and photographed it as evidence.
The next day, teams formed. For the most part they were groups made up of cryptography majors, engineers, and geometry specialists. I'm on a team too, of course.
The lab is in complete uproar right now.
The lobby has become a war room. When you come in the morning, the floor is covered with sleeping bags and empty coffee cups. Remember I told you last time that I'd gotten a thread to follow? Please forget about that.
The cipher is being updated every week. They're analyzing the attackers' patterns in real time and reflecting them into it. It's reassuring, since it seems to mean that what we do has meaning of its own.
The lab is overflowing with energy right now.
Every team pulls out its own weapon and attacks the cipher with all its might. We used to barely manage to exchange greetings, but now when we run into each other in the hallway, we keep each other in check while still smiling. It's fun, too, feeling out how the other teams are progressing while eating in the cafeteria.
It's a competition, but strangely a cheerful one, and I think that's probably because of something Seo-ha said.
"Wouldn't it be a problem if the cipher actually got broken? Not at all. It's a cipher's destiny to be attacked. If you break it, that's your victory, and if it isn't broken, wouldn't that be everyone's victory?
Because it means the lab has fulfilled the very purpose it was built for."
I think I'm only now beginning to understand why he asked us to take on the red team.
David, his cipher is a predator that feeds on the intelligence of its attackers and grows. With every weekly update, its weaknesses disappear.
What's even more incredible is that we, watching the process, feel not displeasure but a sense of accomplishment.
Ah! I just thought of a good idea for bypassing the cipher. I'll close here.
***
"Seo-ha, you really are something..."
Theo let out a sigh laced with admiration as he watched the scene in the lobby. The most renowned cryptographers of both Korea and the United States were charging at the cipher Seo-ha had made with everything they had.
"I was so shocked when I heard there were spies..."
Su-jeong clicked her tongue in amazement.
Not long ago, Seo-ha had received a tip from the National Intelligence Service. Intelligence that among some of the American personnel, and among the Korean researchers as well, spies were mixed in.
Theo insisted they should fire every last one of them immediately. But Seo-ha tilted his head.
"Wasn't the goal to make a cipher that can never be broken?"
Instead, he disclosed all of the information. So that spying could hold no meaning whatsoever.
"Kerckhoffs's principle."
It's the argument that a cryptographic system should be secure even if everything except the key is made public. In modern cryptography there are many attempts to hide the algorithm, but Seo-ha didn't care for that.
"Thanks to this, we get to experience the very best attacks that top-tier resources can wring out. Cryptographers' creativity is truly remarkable. It was exactly what we needed, since we're short on experience."
Theo snorted a laugh.
"Let's stop saying we're short on experience now."
It was true that Team Apex had been novices at cryptography. But that was a story from several months ago. Now it wasn't the case at all. They'd been forged in an environment where the finest cryptographers poured out new attacks every day.
"I never even imagined they'd approach from outside of mathematics."
Su-jeong said, shaking her head.
Thanks to that, they'd been able to learn. That no matter how mathematically perfect a cipher is, the moment it's ported onto a computer, physical constraints arise.
Computation time, core occupancy, memory usage, power consumption. Joseph's team had tried to find a way in by analyzing the patterns in how these things shifted ever so slightly.
It was a primitive approach, like listening with a stethoscope to the vibrations of a safe's dial as it turns. But it worked. And thanks to it, Seo-ha's cipher had grown even more solid.
"Looks like everyone's given up now."
Cecilia looked out at them.
The whiteboard in the lobby was covered, not with strategies for breaking the cipher, but with traces of discussions aimed at interpreting Seo-ha's equations and algorithms.
"It's not that they've given up. Look at their faces."
At Ben's words, everyone turned their gaze.
"That's the face of someone who looks happy."
"You're right."
"It really is."
The team-by-team wariness had vanished.
Now everyone was gathered together, looking at the same equations. When someone explained, someone else would jump right in, leading to lively debate.
"Because they're people who love ciphers."
Theo nodded.
"Ah! I think I get it. There's no noise in Seo-ha's cipher. It's structurally beautiful."
"But it's incredibly efficient and strong on security at the same time."
Su-jeong added.
"So how could they not fall for it? It must be a system they'd only ever dreamed of."
Ben felt like he could understand how they felt.
"Seo-ha, by the way, have you decided on a name for the cipher?"
After thinking for a moment, Seo-ha nodded with a smile.
"I just decided. Shall we call it 'Utopia'? In the sense that mathematics can make everyone happy."
"Hahaha!"
The team members all laughed.
A naive notion, so like Seo-ha.
But to them, Seo-ha's words sounded like this.
"Stop your meaningless efforts to solve this cipher. It's impossible anyway. If you give up, everyone can be happy."
*****
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