Farooq's room was two floors beneath Alan's, where Viral and his group had congregated after Viral's caper. Though they'd only been checked in for a few hours, Farooq had already transformed the top of the bureau shared by every room and the flat screen television above it into a workstation the likes of which Viral only saw in Linus Tech Tip videos on YouTube. Judging by the size of the casing, the volume of the fan, and the external, secondary power source, Viral figured Farooq's system was pushing at least three GPU's.
"And a terabyte of flash storage," Farooq added with a wink. All of them, except Plank, had come to Farooq's room expecting a magic show of crypto analysis. However, after 90 minutes of watching Farooq setup an Azure cloud cluster, most everyone left for the night. Since Viral didn't have a room, though -- because Ankur got their first --, he opted to crash with Farooq. He only wished Farooq would have told him he had another guest.
On the second twin bed on the north side of the hotel room, Dr. Gene Hackman lay tucked beneath the sheets. He wore a light blue pajama top; Viral had never seen a pajama top with a collar. Would Dr. Hackman be sleeping in a tie?
"Do you have an idea how long you'll be on the computer, Farooq? The light from the television is pretty bright," Dr. Hackman said.
"I'm sorry, doc," Farooq said, "I'll bring down the brightness as soon as I got the script going."
From the edge of Farooq's bed, Viral watched Farooq tap his keyboard with the dexterity of Liberace. Looking down at his lap, he took a moment to appreciate the new threads Monica and Avril had dropped at their doors. Monica apologized for the mix-up regarding Viral's room. Apparently Officer Avril couldn't tell the difference between Ankur and Viral. That's why he mixed up their orientation packets. She promised to set Viral up with new accomodations in the morning. Right then, she couldn't think of anything but sleep. And Viral couldn't blame her. He hadn't been awake this long since his first comp sci midterm in the fall. From what little he could recall of that stretch he calculated that he'd been up for 29 hours. Now, he was going on hour 34.
While Monica and Avril described the clothes they dropped off as new, it didn't take Viral long to learn their real provenance. The black, plastic bags in which the clothes came, not to mention their uniform funk of moth balls, screamed of the Salvation Army. In his bag Viral had found an Orlando Magic conference final t-shirt. He couldn't imagine that coming new off the rack.
But to be in a fresh set of clothes was a relief to Viral after his shower. Monica had even told him and the others that tomorrow, before returning to the Women's College, they would visit the mall. Monica had managed to leech a few dollars from the justice department slush fund. Anything they didn't spend on clothes from their stipend, she said, they could use at the food court. Viral could already hear his stomach greasing itself up for a Cinnabun.
Speaking of the federal dole, Farooq had been able to score a sweet deal from Dr. Hackman. Apparently Dr. Hackman's suspended NIH credentials still allowed him access to the government's cloud account. The only catch was that he couldn't use his real email. Farooq had had no problem creating an alias routed through a fake IP coming from a Virginia router farm. Assuming the government even had anyone monitoring their cloud tokens, they'd have a real hard time trying to match Farooq's Virginia-based alias with Dr. Hackman's flagged email address.
The Azure connect gave Farooq access to a couple dozen more virtual GPU's on top of the three stacked on his motherboard. He even managed to secure a pipeline to the quantum processor that ran something like $1,000 an hour. In total the computing power Farooq had stashed in his room in the Ramada was enough to send Apollo 11 to Jupiter and back.
"Why do you need so much processing power?" Viral asked, massaging the hotel's lotion on his feet.
"It's a trade-off between memory and time," Farooq said, checking the connection between an external USB mount and his PC tower. "The quickest way to crack a SHA1 scheme is through a calculated dictionary attack. And for that, my friend, you either need a couple hundred days -- give or take -- or enough computers that can act like 100 days."
Dr. Hackman scratched his scruff, and Viral could hear it from across the room. He shuddered thinking of the dead skin cells he'd have to lie in if he didn't get his own room quick. "How can you turn computers into days?" Hackman asked.
"When I say days I mean time as a measurement of speed. Like light years," Farooq said.
Dr. Hackman made a noncommittal sound somewhere between understanding and apnea.
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Farooq continued, "By running all the different password combinations through every core of every GPU, not to mention the qbits in the quantum pass, we can effectively run a couple hundred million equations a second. What would otherwise take us 3 months will likely only take us 3 hours."
Dr. Hackman opened his eyes wide and nodded. Viral doubted that he understood.
"But how are you going to know when you found the right password?" Viral asked.
Farooq pointed at the flash drive Viral used to download Ankur's slide deck. "That USB has an invisible Debian file that is essentially a database of the passwords used to open it's documents. Of course, not just anyone can read the table or else it"d be worthless."
Viral followed Farooq's finger as it passed along the wire connecting the USB mount to the PC tower. "But by reading the encrypted table of passwords from the thumb drive and putting them into another database I can then cross-reference it with all the passwords I create from my dictionary."
"Dictionary?"
Farooq smiled and snapped his finger. "And that's where the real trick happens. A hash function, H, takes in a password, P, and out comes a garbled soup of nonsense called its Key. Our job is to find the math equation that converts the Key back to P."
"The inverse of the hash function, then," Hackman said, leaning forward in his bed.
"Almost," Farooq said. Opening the top drawer of the bureau he took out a pen and pad of paper stamped with the hotel's name and address. Writing a long sequence of numbers, he said, "But the whole point of H, the hash function, is to make it nearly impossible to reverse. It's one way."
"DNA to protein," Dr. Hackman said.
Farooq thumbed his chin. "Maybe," he said.
"Nevermind, continue," Hackman said, a bit embarrassed, Viral noticed.
"What do you mean nearly impossible?" Viral asked.
Farooq tallied the count of the numbers he'd written. "Each one of these is one of 2^N possible choices. You can imagine how long it would take to cycle through every combination and permutation for something like 2^161 options. It's possible, but not really, and definitely not in the window we have."
"And when does this trick of yours come in?" asked Hackman.
Opening a window in a browser, Farooq pulled up what looked like a family tree. Viral and Dr. Hackman followed his exposition looking at the monitor above his balding crown. "I can cut down the time it takes to guess the password by using a neural net trained on the words Ankur has connected to his digital footprint."
"Meaning?" Dr. Hackman asked, crawling nearly to the end of his bed.
"Meaning I crawled his Twitter, his Facebook, and every article he's posted online under his real name. Fortunately for us, Dr. Ankur Bhalla was quite the prolific publisher at Johns Hopkins."
"I knew there was value to never publishing," Hackman said beneath his breath.
"Then what's the point of the neural net if you're already parsing all the text he's published?" Viral asked. He felt it was important to let Farooq and Dr. Hackman know that he too took a machine learning course.
Farooq stood and dimmed the output on the television. Dr. Hackman gave him a namaste. He was now sitting on the edge of the bed, his bare feet on the green carpet.
"The neural net will create combinations of words that don't appear in the text. That way we can get a little bit of access into that part of Ankur's mind that considers itself creative."
"Marvelous," Dr. Hackman giggled. Viral moved a bit further away from him on his bed. The doctor's enthusiasm seemed on the edge of pathological.
"That becomes a part of our dictionary, augmented on top of standard code breaking dictionaries, too, and we can put those words into the USB's hash function until we get a match. And whatever word creates that match, then that's our password."
"Thassit!" Dr. Hackman said with a bounce.
"No, wait," Viral said, "You said the function, the inverse hash, was super hard to reverse. So even if you get a matching output with a word from the dictionary, how are you going to know what word was the one that made the match? You said you have like a hundred million words running through the GPU's at a time."
Farooq and Dr. Hackman shared a look. Hackman even nodded, seeming a bit impressed. "The boy's got a point," the doc said.
With a magician's flare, Farooq highlighted a box in his Jupyter Notebook app. "That is the memory that lets us speed everything up. This function creates a record for every password that we test. When we get the right one, all we got to do is trace the stack back to where we meet the original P, or password." He wrote on the pad of paper:
R(H(p)) = R(Key)
Viral looked at the formula. Something about it struck him as off, but he couldn't put his finger on it.
"Is it going?" Dr. Hackman's asked.
"It's going," Farooq said, holding a bag of Twizzlers over his shoulder toward the doc.
"Are you guys going to stay up and watch it?" Viral asked.
"Maybe for a while just to make sure it doesn't crash," Farooq said.
"Yeah, just for a while," Dr. Hackman echoed.
The two looked to Viral like Narcissi lost in a hall of mirrors. Their mouths hung open and their eyes agape. Columns and rows of information flickered on the television screen, hundreds of millions of combinations every second. If all went according to plan, by the time he woke Viral and his team would have the amino acid sequences of the Covid-19 Spike they would need to begin their research.
Viral couldn't lie to himself. The prospect of a project, a team, and a unified goal filled him with excitement. Of course, there were icicles of guilt hanging from his enthusiasm because if the data from Italy and China was to be believed, a lot of people were going to die. But, he reminded himself, this was America, not the Third World. Science won in the States, for the most part. Might was right, and there was no one mightier than the US of A. The sleep that met him in Farooq's twin bed was as deep and luxurious as the country's amber waves of grain.