The Icebreaker Program

 

Shibu leaned forward and listened intently. 

Saira continued "the third layer of security is called icing, which means that the password string is not fixed. It keeps changing. The rate at which it changes is called the melting point. For this password, the melting point is 10 seconds." 

"You mean, the password string changes every 10 seconds?" Shibu asked. 

"yes" Saira replied. 

"Your Brute force takes one hour to generate all possible password combinations. But the password string changes every 10 seconds, so there is not enough time to check all the possible password combinations" Shibu expressed his understanding. 

"Right," Saira said. 

"Is there a way you can make brute force faster, so that it takes 10 seconds or less, instead of one hour?" Shibu asked. 

"No, the speed of brute-force is dependent on the server. We have the fastest server." She replied. 

"Looks like it's impossible to match the correct password with brute force then" Shibu commented. 

"Think again, what if the correct password is within the list of passwords that brute force is generating in its first 10 seconds?" Saira asked. 

"We need to be really lucky that out of the one hour of password combinations generated, the correct one lies in the first 10 seconds," Shibu said. 

"correct" Saira said. 

"What does your Icebreaker program do?" Shibu asked. 

"My Icebreaker uses AI, to put the most probable passwords first in the list" she replied. 

"Wonderful! So, the chances of hitting the right password in the first 10 seconds are quite high" Shibu said. 

"Right," said Saira. "However, chances are, that we still don't make it, after all, the actual password may not be among the most probable ones" she continued. 

"Can I look at the list of top password combinations that Icebreaker is generating?" Shibu asked. 

"Here it is, have a look" Saira pointed out to her screen, which showed a constant shuffling of passwords. 

Shibu hunched closer to the screen and examined them for 3 long minutes. "What sorting logic does your AI use?" he asked. 

"It has a database of most commonly used passwords. It is also personalized to Donald Point. It has his date of birth, family member names, list of companies he worked, and other personal information" Saira replied. 

"Can I look at the personalized information the AI has?" Shibu asked. 

"It takes it live from the internet," she said.  

"Is there an option for manual data feed?" he asked. 

Saira responded to this question with a drag of hesitation "yes, there is. Why should I believe that you know something about Donald Point that is not already available online?" 

Shibu opened his device screen and handed it to Saira. "This is my internship proposal. If it makes sense to you, you can bet your chances on me," he said. Saira looked at the title 'How to train your AI'. She swiftly glanced through the proposal. She closed her eyes for a minute and then opened them to turn towards her screen. She opened a console and said to Shibu. "You can make a manual entry here" 

Shibu typed in several words of text. 

Saira watched back and forth to both her screens as Shibu typed. She strained her eyes to look at the passing array of password combinations on her screen. She visualized again, the array would stop with a beep and her cursor would point to the correct match; she wished strongly for this visual to come true. Shibu was done making his entries and he too joined Saira in looking at the passing array of password combinations. Both of them looked expectantly, without a blink for the next 5 minutes. Nothing changed. The array continued to scroll down. 

Shibu took a deep breath and leaned back on his chair, gazing at mid-air. Saira too leaned back and looked at the time. "We have 15 minutes left" she said. 

Shibu straightened up and asked "We need to further narrow down this list. Can we manually set the priority for the input it is processing?" he asked. 

Saira slowly turned towards him and said "we will have to get into the code to do that. It's just too huge, we don't have time to edit code" she paused for a while and opened a file, and continued "look, these are some of the keywords that the code is prioritizing. If you make your entries along with these keywords, the code will associate a higher priority" 

"Okay," said Shibu and took a closer look at the keywords in the file. He began typing again, adding these keywords along with the text he had entered again. 

Saira looked at the other screen as she took deep breaths. 

Shibu continued entering his original text along with multiple combinations of the keywords from the file. The words now settled in his mind and he started typing faster and faster. 

Saira leaned forward towards her screen, now breathing heavily. The only thing that played in her mind over and over again is the visual of the array of passwords stopping with a beep and the cursor pointing to the correct match. she could see Shibu typing frantically from the corner of her eye. Suddenly, she let out a scream. Shibu heard a faint beep and looked in the direction where Saira's eyes froze. The cursor was pointing at a password. The array had stopped moving. He looked back at Saira with disbelief. He saw tears flowing down her cheeks. Her eyes were smiling.