Rangini Makha

Crime Thriller

4.8  

Rangini Makha

Crime Thriller

The Password

The Password

4 mins
293


 

Saira coldly responded to Aditya's question "I will explain, but they can get us if we remain here. We need to go." saying this, she grabbed him by his palm and in what seemed like a minute of darkness, they found themselves standing by a deserted road. Aditya did not bother to scan his surrounding this time. He wanted to protest and resist but he knew that Saira was more in control of the situation right now. He closed his fists and slowly articulated "Tell me what do you want from me to leave me back in my time." 

Saira looked at him and began to gather her thoughts. She remembered the day, three years back, in 2133, when she first read Aditya Teja's books. It was exactly a week after she started her internship with Dr. Anant. 

"What is the update," Dr. Anant asked Saira. "Dr. Anant, I have initiated brute force which is going to generate all the 5 trillion password combinations. It will take 1 hour to run" she said. "What is the melting point?" Dr. Anant asked. "10 seconds" Saira replied. "What about your Icebreaker?" he asked. "My icebreaker prototype is taking 30 seconds," Saira replied. Dr. Anant thought for a while and said "I give you one hour on this, if you don't get it, I will transfer it to another team. You can continue working on your internship. Right now, I will send another intern to help you". "Sure, thank you Anant," she said and left. 

As she walked towards her lab, Saira felt desperation to crack the password. She knew it would mean a huge accomplishment to her. "I cannot let this go away to someone else," she told herself. 

In a minute, Shibu entered Saira's lab. With beaming excitement, he said "Saira! You are interning with Dr. Anant too!" Saira's tense thoughts were suddenly broken and she responded delightfully "Hey Shibu! it's so amazing to know that you are interning with Dr. Anant as well! Can I catch up with you later, I am working on something urgent right now" "yeah let's reserve the chat for tonight. Dr. Anant sent me to support you with the password crack. He wants it in an hour" he said. "Really! you specialize in psychology right, what would I do with you. Would you like to guess it! My Icebreaker has an AI which does an intelligent job anyway" Saira said. Shibu pulled a chair for himself and leaning on to it he said "well if you think Anant was not thoughtful enough, that's fine. You can try me out if and when you like" 

Saira glanced back to her screens. The trillions of passwords that the brute-force was generating, were sprawling down the list. The other screen showed her Icebreaker where a maddening reshuffle of the passwords was on. She stared expectantly while knowing fully that she has done what she could do, and now she had only luck to rely on. She visualized the cascade of movement on her screens to stop with a beep and her cursor highlighting the right match; she made a strong wish for this visual to come true. The movement of the meaningless array of letters and numbers on her screens only made her more and more impatient. She saw the time and realized; forty-five minutes remained of the one-hour Anant had given her.  

She turned to Shibu and said "Shibu, listen to me carefully, I want you to grasp it quickly and tell me how you can help" Shibu pulled his chair closer to her. She began "Look, right now, I have got into the account host and fetched the password string." "You already have it" Shibu exclaimed. "Yes, but it is coded" "oh" Shibu sighed. "It has three layers of security. The first layer of security is hashing, which means, an algorithm has coded it" "Do you know how to decode it" Shibu asked. "Yes of course I know. The second layer of security is peppering, which means, for the 8-character password, they attach a 500-character string and then code it again" "do you still know how to decode it" Shibu asked. "Yes, I am using a method called brute force. I have all possible combinations of this 508-character password string. I have trillions of them. Look here" she pointed to the array of passwords lining up one after the other on her screen. "Wow," Shibu said. "This is going to take one hour to complete," she said. "That means you will get the right one in one hour anyway," Shibu said. Saira sighed and said "No because there is a third layer of security that makes it nearly impossible to crack. However, The Icebreaker, which is the name of my internship project, has the potential to crack it" 


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