Hope not theres so few eclipse phase based stories.
Skitterdoc 2077
- Thread starter SpiraSpira
- Start date
- Crossover
- Location
- Behind you with ALL the SRM's
How it should go? Are you referring to the Cyberpunk 2077 timeline/events? I mean, it's your story. The only person that can decide how the story goes is you. You can change it to be whatever you want.
Anyway, I love this story and really hope you continue it.
Combined with everything else ya had to deal with take your time, though it would pretty funny if ya found out your "cyberpsycho apartments" sit right on top of or close to where Dog Town ends up.
Curiously, I could see Taylor working with them, for a time.
Curiously, I could see Taylor working with them, for a time.
Jordisk
<Unverified N00B>
- Location
- Blind Eternities
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Spira has confirmed it as "no longer writting", but explicitly plans to come back to it "at some point".
The other story is already posted. It's called Cultivating Magic.
Thanks, I heard searched before I posted but I clearly did something wrong. Checking it out now.
- Location
- Paradise, Hawaii
Sorta sad no Oct. 31st upload, it would be Prem if a Midnight Temptation happened, you know a Horde would Arise at the Bidding of a Master Writer. And throw off Sleep schedules. Tell me I am wrong.
Spira would type and cackle. "My Summons is Complete! Arise my faithful readers! Your Master Calls!"
And a lot of eyes happen and some will act like Igor and go "Yesth Master!" Some with strange names.
Spira would type and cackle. "My Summons is Complete! Arise my faithful readers! Your Master Calls!"
And a lot of eyes happen and some will act like Igor and go "Yesth Master!" Some with strange names.
RavenWolffe77
The Marauder series is the best BattleMech.
- Location
- Deep Periphery, A Long Way From The Inner Sphere
Hello Shaitan...
Say, do you perchance remember where you stashed the AHQ's nuclear self-destruct device?
Adam probably kept it as a souvenier himself, and was later lost... or stolen by Alt!Danny...
Breadcrumbs:
"We might have a lead for the origin of the Chooh2 Algea." Whatever the small Japanese biomed cooperation CEO was expecting when his CSO wanted an urgent meeting, it wasn't that.
"CSO Hayash: Anybody who tried to crack the Algea had nothing to show for but wasted budgets. I certainly did not authorize any more money to be thrown into that particular black hole. What do you mean by lead? How much did you spend? And who knows about it?"
"We sent an intern into the abandoned project stacks because we needed some makework. Do you remember the Fly Swarm of '64?"
There was an unusual note of levity in the CSO tone. But that must be excused when the natural order of things is so perverted that lowly Interns make progress when the most lavishly funded research teams fail.
"Vaguely"
"Artificially grown cloned Flies congregated in the Night City Biomed Campus. We never figured out the reason. More importantly, part of their DNA was encrypted but still somehow functional. We only figured out the encrypted DNA was critical because we could not clone new viable flies without it.
Then we have the Chooh2 Algea. Their DNA is entirely encrypted. Well, our intelligent little Intern figured out some gene sequences that both flies and algae ought to have that were not present in the unencrypted parts of the fly DNA. Then, he did a known plain text attack on the encryption."
"What is a known plain text attack?"
Usually, executives used their agents to look up unknown terms. Lest they show weakness before their colleges.
"You have an encrypted message, and you are pretty sure what it should say, and use that knowledge to crack the encryption in general. A typical example is a military unit that sends a report in a predictable format at a predictable time."
"So you cracked the encryption?"
"Unfortunately, no. But our Intern and I double-checked with our sigint crypto experts, and they agree that it is likely that the same encryption method with a different key was used. We would need more encrypted species to do anymore."
"So you are telling me that whoever was behind those algae was also interested in our night city campus. Were we doing anything relating to Algea or Chooh2 there?"
The CSO snorted. "Sure, all our minor research campuses have projects that disrupt the most crucial commodity market in the world. Nobody back then was insane enough to touch Chooh2 because Biotechnica would firebomb you, and nobody was interested in doing anything with Algea because the infrastructure to use Algea in any way did not exist."
"So, no clue what they might have been interested in? Who knows about this. Who knows about the flies in general."
"The Intern told his team lead. She then told my assistant, who told me. Some crypto experts from Sigint. Counterintel claims the team lead and the crypto experts are clean, and nobody is interested enough in us to plant interns on us. And before you ask, I had the now-former Intern sign a 20-year contract before I came here.
As for the flies, we are the only ones who know about them unless they were deployed and caught somewhere else. If they were deployed, then it is unlikely that they were captured. We only captured them because of dumb luck. Yes, everybody talked about them at the water cooler. Luckily, the rumor mill did not include enough detail to replicate known plain-text findings."
Suddenly the CEO started laughing. "You what is hilarious... he he he ... I made my way to the top in acquisitions. I do not know how often we took some stolen tech from the corpse of some poor fool who thought he struck gold when he got his hands on the tech. And now my whole cooperation is in the same situation. We lucked into something absolutely priceless, but we are way too small to make use of it. And if we try to sell it to a bigger fish, we will just get eaten."
"We might have a lead for the origin of the Chooh2 Algea." Whatever the small Japanese biomed cooperation CEO was expecting when his CSO wanted an urgent meeting, it wasn't that.
"CSO Hayash: Anybody who tried to crack the Algea had nothing to show for but wasted budgets. I certainly did not authorize any more money to be thrown into that particular black hole. What do you mean by lead? How much did you spend? And who knows about it?"
"We sent an intern into the abandoned project stacks because we needed some makework. Do you remember the Fly Swarm of '64?"
There was an unusual note of levity in the CSO tone. But that must be excused when the natural order of things is so perverted that lowly Interns make progress when the most lavishly funded research teams fail.
"Vaguely"
"Artificially grown cloned Flies congregated in the Night City Biomed Campus. We never figured out the reason. More importantly, part of their DNA was encrypted but still somehow functional. We only figured out the encrypted DNA was critical because we could not clone new viable flies without it.
Then we have the Chooh2 Algea. Their DNA is entirely encrypted. Well, our intelligent little Intern figured out some gene sequences that both flies and algae ought to have that were not present in the unencrypted parts of the fly DNA. Then, he did a known plain text attack on the encryption."
"What is a known plain text attack?"
Usually, executives used their agents to look up unknown terms. Lest they show weakness before their colleges.
"You have an encrypted message, and you are pretty sure what it should say, and use that knowledge to crack the encryption in general. A typical example is a military unit that sends a report in a predictable format at a predictable time."
"So you cracked the encryption?"
"Unfortunately, no. But our Intern and I double-checked with our sigint crypto experts, and they agree that it is likely that the same encryption method with a different key was used. We would need more encrypted species to do anymore."
"So you are telling me that whoever was behind those algae was also interested in our night city campus. Were we doing anything relating to Algea or Chooh2 there?"
The CSO snorted. "Sure, all our minor research campuses have projects that disrupt the most crucial commodity market in the world. Nobody back then was insane enough to touch Chooh2 because Biotechnica would firebomb you, and nobody was interested in doing anything with Algea because the infrastructure to use Algea in any way did not exist."
"So, no clue what they might have been interested in? Who knows about this. Who knows about the flies in general."
"The Intern told his team lead. She then told my assistant, who told me. Some crypto experts from Sigint. Counterintel claims the team lead and the crypto experts are clean, and nobody is interested enough in us to plant interns on us. And before you ask, I had the now-former Intern sign a 20-year contract before I came here.
As for the flies, we are the only ones who know about them unless they were deployed and caught somewhere else. If they were deployed, then it is unlikely that they were captured. We only captured them because of dumb luck. Yes, everybody talked about them at the water cooler. Luckily, the rumor mill did not include enough detail to replicate known plain-text findings."
Suddenly the CEO started laughing. "You what is hilarious... he he he ... I made my way to the top in acquisitions. I do not know how often we took some stolen tech from the corpse of some poor fool who thought he struck gold when he got his hands on the tech. And now my whole cooperation is in the same situation. We lucked into something absolutely priceless, but we are way too small to make use of it. And if we try to sell it to a bigger fish, we will just get eaten."
cryptoam
building an 1980s encrypted protocol
- Location
- in lockdown waiting and bored...
Technically a successfully KPA is a "crack" of the encryption under most scenarios. In this case though, I think we are looking at a distinguishing attack. A distinguishing attack is one that within the bounds of the scenario(IE chosen plaintext, known plaintext, ciphertext only and other variations) successfully detects the use of the encryption at greater probability than random guessing given certain bounds on attacker resources(ie not brute forcing keys until you get either a likely decryption or run out).
Also, if they already have this sort of attack, it's going to only get easier for them in the future to break the encryption scheme. IRL cryptographers tend to start moving away from stuff that has already been weakened a bit more than expected(ie needs 2**119 instead of 2**128 operations) even when the encryption is still good for now.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
So, can you figure-out a scheme to persuade the unknown bio-engineer to make more of these? Just taunting doesn't seem likely to be enough...
Also, your target is obviously an amazing biologist. What if they've also modelled the decryption attempts likely, and the tools likely to have been used? And, juggled things so a covert AI will end-up being run, as a result of the likely decryption process? That could be... bad.
(Won't happen, of course. Taylor's not getting programming help from shard-chan. Unless, maybe, shard-chan can be sold on the idea that covert AIs makes a cyber-organism even more nasty?)
((Does shard-chan even have the Entity tech-databases needed to make hidden, encrypted, covert-attack AIs???))
Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
I have no idea if Taylor's personal space alien will reuse a cipher if she asks it to encrypt another organism's genome and doesn't specify a new cipher. And I don't think she has enough experience or training with cryptography to make that request.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Might be a question of how good shard-chan is at cryptography? The answer is likely, 'pretty good', as the Entity tech-database would appear to contain the best tech looted from many races. And, an important part of 'best practice' use of cryptography is not reusing cyphers?
Also, hiding the tech they're using, so it's 'black boxed', and can't be re-used without Tinker help seems an important part of shard procedures. But, shard-chan is incomplete, 'broken' from a standard shard PoV, so, things might be rather less certain...
Taylor's situation is a bit weird, in that with enough careful work she seems to be able to personally understand the tech of shard-chan...
nicoo
Malfunctioning neurochemistry, please be kind.
- Location
- Europe
- Pronouns
- They/She/Meow
Yeah, that was also my interpretation. 👍
I suspect shard-chan would have significant [INTEREST] in a distinguisher for their DNA obfuscation thing, even if they aren't into cryptography in general.
Yeah, unfortunately my experience is that getting most engineers to stop using primitives that aren't believed to be secure anymore is... a challenge, to keep it polite:
in bleeping 2023, I'm still getting people going "HMAC-MD5 or HMAC-SHA1 are fine, there's no practical attack on those," nevermind that systems don't only need to be secure now / at the time they were designed, but also remain secure over their entire lifetime.
The impact of a theoretical break gets worse over time too, since most academic cryptographers lose interest in beating a dead horse, whereas potential attackers get a leg up and have no interest whatsoever in publishing practical cryptanalysis results.
That's also the reason why I'm trying to push for new systems to use post-quantum cryptography now at least as far as confidentiality is concerned, i.e. in key exchange, symmetric encryption, etc. Authentication & integrity are somewhat less time-critical, since a break in the future won't impact the integrity of communications that happened before it.
In a way, that's what's happening here too: later cryptanalysis broke confidentiality of old encrypted genomes that had been saved away, just enough to confirm the same known-plaintext occurs in both.
I somehow doubt that Taylor, as she's been depicted so far, would go for making weaponized, intelligent organisms: based on her self-modification, relationship with shard-chan, and interactions with Delamain, I'd expect she'd consider intelligent beings to be people regardless of whether they run on Earth-standard biology, alien crystal shards, or as machine code.
I could maybe see it eventually happen, if the organism's design goal wasn't to cause harm but either study the "bio-cryptanalysis" attempts, or find ways to report the DNA obfuscation was broken and plausibly let Taylor find where: biosafety standards (presumably) don't cover infoforms escaping containment through the Internet.
That said, non-pathogenic flies and alga would most most likely not be studied in an extreme-isolation lab: in principle, a BSL-2 facility would do (tinkertech organisms would hopefully fail the "well-characterized agents" criterion for BSL-1) and those mostly require safety cabinets for things known to (potentially) create aerosols or splashes, and extreme care in handling sharps (but that it should just be common sense). It should be well within Taylor's abilities to make the deobfuscated organism produce a gas that is harmless, innocuous, and unique-enough to be detectable; maybe some unique isomer of an otherwise-common volatile organic compound?
Does it have to be a software AI? A wetware one would play more to her (and shard-chan's) strengths; even though it's not bypassing entirely the concept of biological containment, it would still be pretty hard to keep an intelligent organism contained, especially one with unknown capabilities and which wasn't expected to appear (and whose intelligence might not even have been noticed yet)
I do really like the idea of embedding a "traditional cyberpunk" AI in a biological organism though, but I'm not sure how the AI payload could actually be deployed: before it can run itself on traditional computers, its biological carrier would have to interact with computer systems somehow.
It could be as mundane as "researchers sequence the DNA, DNA contains exploits for most popular models of sequencers, gaining code execution on it, as both a foothold into the local network and a platform to bootstrap the AI... but then it's back to normal infosec, an update for the sequencer might fix the vulnerability and prevent the deployment of the embedded AI, etc.
At the very least, that sounds like an intriguing potential cooperation if Taylor ever meets an AI and they need to infiltrate an agent in a biolab (or a facility that happens to include one)
From a cryptography perspective, reusing some primitive is perfectly fine; for instance, all communications with websites (or anything else using TLS) all use one of a handful of elliptic curves for key exchange, block ciphers, etc. Reusing a key would be an obvious problem, but that's not what was going on in @Torlek's snippet.
Instead, they were only able to tell that the same basic primitive was used to obfuscate both organisms... but since nobody else on Earth uses it, they deduced they were (most likely) created by the same group.
Here, the tinker tech would have been in the "hive," which was tinker-made (and plausibly actively powered/run by the shard) but it produces flies that run on conventional chemistry and physics, for all that their genome isn't encoded the same way as in Earthly organisms.
Even then, it wouldn't be necessary to understand how two tinkertech artefacts operate, to tell whether they were made by the same tinker: say, it's easy to recognise Squealer's vehicles, and nobody would confuse them with Armsmaster's bike.
Yeah, that's been quite interesting: Taylor doesn't have other parahumans to fight, and shard-chan and [best host] are a lot more interested in gaining knowledge (by reading the local Earth's publications, or doing her own labwork) than typical.
My read on that, is Taylor was (and still is) under a lot of pressure not to release obviously-alien tech, so instead she's been forced to design things that are plausible in the local tech base, with shard-chan's helping understand all the biology and chemistry involved.
... and sorry, I only just realised I got rather wordy again 😅
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cryptoam
building an 1980s encrypted protocol
- Location
- in lockdown waiting and bored...
Actually no. You typically want to focus analysis and design effort on the fewest cryptographic primitives possible(IE one main block cipher and another one for highly resource constrained situations) and then build your surrounding schemes and protocols around said primitives. Trying to go for a shotgun design effort means you start to lose the sort of in depth and persistent cryptanalytic effort and insight needed to have confidence in the security of the primitive. Modern day cryptographic standard efforts(that are worth actually using and relying on for security) start with a lot of potential designs but then quickly winnow down the candidates based off various factors like how well they meet design criteria(ie lightweight, side channel resistance, etc) and also the weight of analysis against the design. The only time I can really see shotgunning your cryptographic primitives being useful is when you are fully unaware and afraid of what your adversary is capable of which is not a very favorable position to be as a cryptographer. You'll likely either fail to achieve security anyways or end up with a very obese primitive that is difficult to handle or both at the same time.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
I'd agree with you. But, if you've got full physical access to what you're trying to break the security of, like a living organism, and good quality tools to study that, it's difficult to see how you won't eventually succeed.
However, if the secured system is using novel biology, or even worse, novel physics, without a major breakthrough, your attempt is going to fail. Novel biology might be using quantum effects than are currently understood - for example, photosynthesis is more recently believed to use this. Novel physics might involve unexpected information transfer - not quite the same thing, but this has allowed Taylor network access when believed to be totally isolated.
No matter how good the analysis tools you've got, if there are things going on in your target which you don't have the science for, odds are your analysis will fail. A good science fiction example would be all those pre-1980s stories, where brilliant Earth scientists crack all the alien secret tech. But, those earlier 20thC scientists would have real problems if the alien tech depended on nano-scale structure of materials, which human science only really dug into late 20thC/early 21stC, and that wasn't a concept in their science...
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The idea of an encryption that works while the data is being processed (that is, while the organism is actively living) and all data is accessible (because the adversary can physically disassemble it and look at the molecules) does seem very tricky. I am not a cryptographer but I wouldn't expect it to really be possible.
On the other hand if we move away from the language of encryption, Taylor and her Shard would find it easy to build a biochemistry that simply doesn't use many of the familiar patterns of Earth life. Xenobiology, in effect, which makes much of the existing knowledge and techniques the bioengineers know inapplicable as constituted.
Downside is that that people would credibly believe it was done by aliens. And be correct.
On the other hand if we move away from the language of encryption, Taylor and her Shard would find it easy to build a biochemistry that simply doesn't use many of the familiar patterns of Earth life. Xenobiology, in effect, which makes much of the existing knowledge and techniques the bioengineers know inapplicable as constituted.
Downside is that that people would credibly believe it was done by aliens. And be correct.
It would be challenging for a hardware cryptographic device to be secure indefinitely against Mallory, who has arbitrary amounts of time booked on electron microscopes, X-ray crystallographers and what have you, but being secure indefinitely against key extraction is hardly ever necessary. For the Biotechnica affair, for example, as pointed out the security only needed to hold wrt tamper resistance for a few weeks, which is likely much easier. Even should key extraction be downright trivial for Biotechnica, it's possible to buy time by, say, reinitialising the key every time the organism replicates.
Of course we see in the Night City Biomed Campus incident that key extraction for the security module should actually be nontrivial for an adversary (though one perhaps less advanced than Biotechnica) but "sufficiently difficult that attentions are turned elsewhere because it's not worth affecting quarterly profits over" is likely achievable with techniques that don't necessarily even have to be state of the art.
Of course we see in the Night City Biomed Campus incident that key extraction for the security module should actually be nontrivial for an adversary (though one perhaps less advanced than Biotechnica) but "sufficiently difficult that attentions are turned elsewhere because it's not worth affecting quarterly profits over" is likely achievable with techniques that don't necessarily even have to be state of the art.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
By Professor Haywire or another tinker familiar with his tech, certainly. By anyone in the Cyberpunk Universe? Not as far as Taylor knows.
- Location
- London
Taylor's the only Parahuman, so even if alt Prof. Haywire is there they aren't a tinker so it doesn't matter.
Haywire tech basically uses wormholes, idk how you would detect that considering it should be just large enough to pass information. I think that if the high tech lab detectors cannot detect communication between Taylor and her Passenger they should not be able to detect her communicating between clones.