Android 95 - Three Years Is Enough
Android 95 — they say three years is enough.
“Three years?” Samuel Arthur, Director of the National Security Agency, couldn’t hide his disbelief at the voice coming through the speakerphone. He had known about the press conference at Android Inc.’s headquarters today and had already dispatched personnel. ID Group was a company granted protective measures for the sake of America’s advanced technology security, and its founder, Yoo Jae-won, was likewise designated a national asset under explicit U.S. protection. These measures had not originated from the NSA itself. They were policy directives set by the National Intelligence Council, an organization above the NSA. Thanks to that protection, the NSA had been able to send its own agents disguised as reporters to monitor the situation in real time. The shock Director Samuel Arthur felt while receiving live reports of Yoo Jae-won’s press conference through those agents was far more vivid.
Three years was already an understatement. Yoo Jae-won had declared that with the computational power of a cloud server linking tens of thousands of computers, even DES encryption could be broken in less than a day. Furthermore, he announced that embedding such a DES-based system into the Secure Area of the next Android OS would leave even the United States vulnerable, and that the Secure Area itself would be opened to third-party developers. The NSA’s intention to lower the encryption level of the Secure Area for overseas PCs alone—thereby reducing the difficulty of hacking—had been completely thwarted.
Still, there was one thing that needed verification. Whether DES could truly be decrypted in three years on modern PCs. Yoo Jae-won’s entire line of reasoning and justification rested on the ease of breaking DES. That claim had neutralized the logic of the official documents they had painstakingly prepared and served as the pretext for opening the Secure Area to multiple security firms.
“Are PCs really that powerful these days?” As far as Director Arthur knew, the performance of recently released PCs had improved dramatically, but not to that extent. Even if DES was outdated, he believed it could not be broken by a PC in a mere three years.
“Call Dr. Marvin for me.” Director Arthur pressed the intercom on his desk and summoned the man.
“What is it this time?” Dr. Marvin made no effort to conceal his irritation at being interrupted during work. Surprisingly, Director Arthur showed no displeasure at the doctor’s attitude. The reason was simple: Dr. Marvin was someone who could get away with it. Though over sixty and with completely white hair, Dr. Marvin remained the NSA’s foremost mathematician and computer expert. If all his achievements at the NSA were documented, they would pile high enough to bury the director’s desk. Moreover, these accomplishments had not been driven by any burning desire to serve the nation; he simply enjoyed solving complex mathematical problems. In particular, he loved breaking codes, which was the main reason he remained with the NSA. He was the kind of person they could not stop if he chose to leave, so even the director could tolerate a certain degree of rudeness from him.
“Chairman Yoo Jae-won said three years would be sufficient to break DES.”
“Three years? That long?” Dr. Marvin countered.
“Ah, he meant using a single PC released just a few days ago.”
Dr. Marvin’s skepticism about the length of time dissolved with the director’s clarification.
“Hmm. Interesting.” Dr. Marvin had thought three years was excessive because the NSA’s own supercomputers could dismantle DES in mere days. The decryption program running on those supercomputers had been created and optimized by Dr. Marvin himself. With ordinary PCs, however, the story changed. Even the prideful Dr. Marvin had to admit that three years was an astonishingly short timeframe.
“He also claimed that with ID Technology’s cloud system, mobilizing around 1,024 units could finish the job in a single day.”
“In one day?” Dr. Marvin’s eyes lit up. After a moment of thought, he nodded. “I’ve been researching parallel processing myself. But simply connecting two PCs doesn’t yield a clean 200% performance increase like adding one plus one. The key is improving efficiency. If it’s Yoo Jae-won, he could probably pull it off. Besides, how many computers does ID Technology have? Over twenty thousand, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“If they pooled them all for a single project, the computational power would be enormous. We should take this opportunity to retire our outdated single-system supercomputers and adopt a cloud system instead.”
Though Arthur couldn’t quite follow how the conversation had arrived there, since Dr. Marvin said it was possible, the director had no choice but to nod. Of course, Director Arthur himself was not entirely uninterested in cloud systems. The CIA had been highly satisfied with the cloud system purchased from ID Technology for big data searches, and there were rumors they were exploring a much larger-scale repurchase.
“Well, judging by your reaction, it seems Chairman Yoo Jae-won responded to our policy today. In that case, instead of bickering among ourselves here, shouldn’t we go verify whether it’s actually possible?”
Dr. Marvin had cut straight to the heart of the matter once again. Even Director Arthur had to admit the man was right. Only by confirming that a regular PC could crack DES in three years—and that a cloud system could do it in a single day—could they establish their future course of action.
“What if his words turn out to be true?”
“Then we’re finished. First, the congressmen will throw a fit. They’ll start by demanding to know where all that budget went. They’ll certainly ask why we needed multimillion-dollar supercomputers when a few thousand PCs would suffice. You’d better prepare your answers.”
“Doctor, this is no time for pointless jokes.”
Faced with the director’s stern and serious expression, Dr. Marvin stopped teasing.
“If you’re asking for an exit strategy, it’s simple. Just acknowledge Yoo Jae-won’s ability and it ends cleanly.”
At Dr. Marvin’s nonchalant reply, the director’s stern expression softened. He wondered why he had even asked. Yet upon reflection, it wasn’t wrong. They could claim that DES’s previously undetected vulnerabilities had only now been revealed thanks to Yoo Jae-won’s exceptional talent. Furthermore, they could argue that the official documents had never mandated DES, only recommended it. Still, what pained Director Arthur most was that the NSA would once again be forced to swallow its pride before Yoo Jae-won. Most regrettable of all was that AES, still considered an impregnable fortress, would now spread widely among ordinary users. As a result, detecting hidden threats within the populace would become even more difficult—an existential threat to American security.
Of course, these thoughts reflected Director Arthur’s personal inclinations; it would be unreasonable to claim every NSA employee shared them.
“Understood.”
Having accepted that there was no better option, Director Arthur finally nodded.
Several days passed.
Yoo Jae-won, who had stirred up an unexpected security controversy in the United States, was working in the Alpha Team office as usual. Taking a brief break, he opened a web browser and accessed the Nextcom news page.
Among the numerous articles, one stood out immediately—the one using provocative words like “loophole” and “evasion.”
“This was published the day before yesterday, yet it’s still ranked high.”
One of Nextcom’s strengths was its ability to generate separate ranked lists based on views, recommendations, and other metrics over specific periods. This feature had recently been further enhanced, allowing users to select their preferred criteria for sorting posts, and the functionality had even extended to news articles. Remarkably, this feature had not come from Nextcom’s own developers but from Yahoo, which had signed a search engine partnership with Nextcom. It was an extension of the PageRank technology. Yoo Jae-won had expected internet technology to advance rapidly and produce such tools earlier than in his previous life, but he had not anticipated it would come from Yahoo, with whom he had a contract. Jerry and David of Yahoo had intended to apply the technology only at the website level. Yoo Jae-won had suggested better applications and implemented it on Nextcom. Of course, a separate usage agreement had been signed as well.
Unfortunately, Jerry and David had also expressed their intention to become independent from Nextcom. Though regrettable, since their resolve was firm, they had agreed to part ways cleanly after 1995. Yoo Jae-won had decided to either find a replacement search engine or develop one in-house.
At the moment, the list displayed before Yoo Jae-won was sorted by the highest number of comments over the past week.
“Still fighting, I see.”
Normally, articles on Nextcom’s news front page received a few hundred comments. Popular ones sometimes exceeded a thousand, though such articles were rare. Now, however, the count had easily surpassed ten thousand—a level of engagement comparable to the height of comment-bot activity in the 21st century.
Yoo Jae-won did not bother clicking into the articles to read the comments. Internet comment wars were endless loops, as always.
The other highly commented articles were all related to ID Group as well. Since the press conference, no one from the NSA had visited, nor had any new official documents arrived. Instead, an email had come addressed to Yoo Jae-won. It claimed that several files with lost passwords needed decryption and requested his cooperation, even specifying a reward of one thousand dollars per file. It was obvious this was an attempt to verify his earlier claim. Their excuse for hiding their humiliation was that they had “lost the passwords.” It was something he could have ignored without a second thought. But since he had made the statement himself, Yoo Jae-won accepted the files and began decryption—after thoroughly scanning them for any suspicious viruses, of course.
Fortunately, the first password was found within three hours of running the decryption program on the cloud server. Since the method involved brute-forcing random passwords, luck sometimes delivered results early. Within twenty-four hours, all passwords had been recovered. Yoo Jae-won emailed back the decrypted documents along with the passwords. There was no further response after that.
Instead, a shift occurred in the federal government’s actions, which was now visible through the news. Having confirmed that Yoo Jae-won had proven his words, they began abandoning DES as if they had decided to discard it entirely. The previous pressure to adopt DES seemed to have been conveniently erased from memory.
“At least that’s a relief.”
Executives like Remington and Kevin Johnson were outraged by the lack of any apology, but Yoo Jae-won considered it fortunate that they had at least listened. In society, people often stubbornly pushed forward even when their mistakes were laid bare, unwilling to admit fault. Nations were no different, yet this time things had resolved relatively smoothly.
Instead, more people were now showing interest from other directions. Some corners of the internet speculated that Yoo Jae-won had orchestrated the surge in IT security company stock prices. But neither Yoo Jae-won nor ID Group had any need for such schemes, and none had taken place. Investments in companies like Symantec, McAfee, and Trend Micro had already been completed through ID Investment the previous year. ID Investment’s total investment in IT-related stocks exceeded ten billion dollars—a sum combining Yoo Jae-won’s personal funds with capital raised from ordinary investors in Korea and the United States. While Wall Street had far larger private equity funds, ID Investment was the only one investing at this scale in the IT sector alone. As a result, traditional Wall Street firms believed the upstart ID Investment was recklessly overextending after two successes, but that prediction was proving entirely wrong.
With Android’s listing, an IT boom had begun, and the rise in IT-related stocks on Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange far outpaced other sectors. ID Investment had already recorded returns exceeding 50 percent, attracting even more investors.
“The IT boom is only just starting—if it’s already like this, we’re in trouble.”
Yoo Jae-won wanted to tell the complainers to invest even small amounts instead of grumbling. Once the IT boom truly ignited, even modest sums would multiply like a snowball rolling down a snowy hill—100 percent certain.
“Right now is the time to add more firewood to keep the flames burning bright.”
While grumbling at the dissatisfied voices, Yoo Jae-won pulled out the proposals from IT security companies seeking to participate in the next Android’s Secure Area. None had been officially announced yet, but he intended to release a proper policy statement that would fan the flames even higher.