Thomas Hoover - The samurai strategy

"Here, put this back in her case. While I start pulling up the file."

I'd just finished snapping it shut when I heard an expletive from out on the floor that would not be judged suitable for family audiences.

"Watch your language."

She was sitting there staring at the screen. Finally she turned and looked at me. "So close, yet so far. It's encrypted'."

"It's what?"

"Come and look."

I did. On the screen was a mass of numeric garbage. What was this all about?

"Matt, when this disk was written, whatever went on it was scrambled using some key, probably the DES system, the 'data-encryption standard.' It keeps unauthorized intruders like us from snooping."

"How does anybody read it?"

"A decrypting key must be in the hardware down on eleven. But we can't get through to that level of the machine without an 'access code.' Which we don't have."

"Very smart. The electronic keys to the kingdom." I watched, wondering all the while what Yamada was doing out there. Should I blunder out and chat him up with my Berlitz Japanese, just to keep him occupied? The clock above the door was ticking away.

"Tam, why not just try activating the key using your own password as the access code? Maybe it'll get you into that level on the mainframe."

She gave it a go, without much enthusiasm. Predictably the message came back, 'ACCESS CODE NOT RECOGNIZED.'

"Well, try some others." I was grasping. "Hit it with 'NODA' or 'MORI.'"

She did, but after both were rejected the workstation suddenly signed off. Click, out of the system.

"What's happened now?"

"More bad news. I forgot the mainframe is programmed so that you get three tries at a protected code and then it breaks the connection. That's to keep crackers like us from sitting here all day and running passwords at random. Another security precaution."

"Three chances to guess the secret word and then you're out. Sounds like a game show." I just stood there and scratched my head. Seemed we were, to be blunt, shit out of luck. "What now, Professor? I assume there are about a hundred million alphanumeric combinations they could use."

"Close." She was clicking away at the keyboard. "So let's think a minute." She glanced back at me. "Why don't we assume for a minute that this is a MITI disk."

"Safe bet."

"So the decryptor key in the machine here would be from MITI, right, since Mori obviously brought the disk to be read?"

"Sounds good."

"You know, I was in Ken's office once, and I recall watching some of his staff playing around with the information on one of these disks. Don't know why I still remember this, but the password they used was… I think MX something, three letters, followed by six digits. The digits were always changing, but the prefix was the same."

"So if your wild guess about this being a MITI disk is right, and the first two letters of the three-letter alpha part are still MX, that means there are exactly, what-twenty-six letters in the alphabet times a million numbers-twenty-six million combinations. We're looking for one number in twenty-six million? So if it takes, say, five seconds to type one in and try it, we're talking roughly a hundred and thirty million seconds to go the course." I glanced again at the door. "Besides which, we get kicked off after every third try. Working around the clock, we ought to have it sometime about, what, 2001?"

She glanced back at the screen, then suddenly whirled around, a funny look on her face. "What do you have in your office?"

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you have a PC downtown?"

"Just a little IBM AT, 512K. And also a Mac, a toy I use to draw cutsey-poo pictures now and then and do covers for reports."

"How about a telephone modem?"

"Built in. How else could I handle all that trading?"

"And it's up?"

"The IBM? Never turn it off. Little twitch left over from playing the Hong Kong exchanges. Habits die hard."

"Okay, I'm going to try and use it to crack the code in DNI's mainframe."

Honestly, for a second there I thought my hearing had gone. "My little IBM against that monster? How, forchrissake? There're twenty-six million-"

"We'll have to do something not very nice. Since the Japanese aren't used to hackers, those bearded malcontents in firms who screw up business computers for spite, these workstations aren't buffered off sensitive parts of the system. We are now going to exploit that trust in Japanese culture. We're going to organize these terminals, hook them to your computer, and then direct that network against the mainframe downstairs. Something no Japanese would ever dream of doing." She got up and went down the row clicking on machines. "There's a list of names in my office, there by the phone. Can you bring it?"

"Coming up." I fetched it. It was a temporary "phone book" of the staff on the floor. She took the list and went back down the line of stations, typing something on each keyboard.

"What are you doing, Tam? This is crazy."

"It'll just take a second. Everybody here has a password to sign on to the mainframe, but it's just the name of the person." She came back to the first workstation. "Now the mainframe thinks ten people just signed on to the system. We'll use these terminals to try access codes on the main computer. Your PC will control them so that each terminal hits it with two codes and then the next one goes on line. That way we'll never get kicked off. It should get around the 'three times and you're out' filter downstairs." She began frantically typing again.

"What are you doing now?"

"We could try alphanumerics sequentially or randomly. I think randomly is probably better. It'll be faster. So I'm writing a little program for the mainframe, a random-number generator. It'll start making up random access codes of MX followed by a letter and six digits and sending them to your PC downtown, which will immediately feed them back in pairs to these terminals. Out one door, in another. Maybe that will fool it."

"Christ, woman, you've got a criminal mind. Is this the kind of stuff you teach at NYU?"

"What's your number downtown?" She was typing away again.

I wrote it down and handed it to her. "I don't have the foggiest idea how you're going to be able to swing this."

"That's all right. I do. Just let me get your IBM networked into these terminals here. Fortunately it's compatible, and all it's going to be doing for now is bouncing back numbers generated by the mainframe." She flipped some switches, then typed my number onto the screen. I momentarily wondered if the sleet had knocked out the phone system. It hadn't.

Again the seconds crawled by, but as soon as she'd finished her chat with my IBM downtown, the row of terminals suddenly started beeping away. Two shots, beep, the next one came alive; two shots, beep, right down the row.

"Okay, your computer is running the show now. Sooner or later maybe something will click." She punched a couple more keys, then got up.

"It's done?"

"Ready to rock and roll." She was putting on her coat. "We'll be running millions of numbers."

"Isn't anybody going to know you've pulled this?" I was, I confess, totally dumbfounded.

"Not unless they discover my little program in the mainframe downstairs. But it's just a random-number generator, something any sophomore could write. The trick is, we're hitting it with so many terminals it won't be programmed to keep track of all these little elves trying to sneak in. And when we're through we'll turn them all off using your modem downtown."

"Good God, whatever happened to pen and pencil?" I was still dazed. She'd done it all so fast. "If you can find the decryptor key and get into the files, then what? You going to dump all the info on Mori's sexy little CD down at my place?"

"I hope you've got lots of paper. Who knows what's on it." She was shutting off the lights. "Come on, let's get out of here."