Chapter 28
Jennifer’s hands played her keyboard like a concert pianist at work on a grand piano. It occurred to Heather, as she watched her friend, that despite her protestations to the contrary, Jennifer must have also picked up some neural enhancement that refined her finger dexterity.
Heather glanced over to where Mark had pulled up a chair next to Jennifer’s computer desk. He had laughed off the embarrassing incident at the school, refusing to tell anyone who the perpetrators were, but she knew him. Inside he was seething.
If the boys who had roughed him up knew anything about him, they would not sleep for the rest of the school year. Mark was a bulldog. Once he got motivated, he didn’t let up until he emerged victorious.
“Jen says you’ve started working out,” Heather said.
Mark glanced over at her. “Yep. Dad wasn’t using his old free weights, so I got him to give them to me. A little extra muscle mass on this body wouldn’t hurt.”
“Just don’t go getting so muscle-bound that you look like one of those magazine guys.”
Mark laughed. “Nope. I just want toning and strength.”
“And those books on aikido you bought?” Jennifer asked.
“That’s just for flexibility.”
Heather nodded. “Uh-huh. And just how much time are you spending trying to stay flexible?”
“No more than two hours a night.”
“Every night?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Sounds like you’re going to be one flexible dude.”
“Well, it relaxes me after a hard day of school, basketball practice, and homework.”
Heather looked at Mark closely. He seemed relaxed. Obviously he had a plan in the works and was comfortable that it was progressing on schedule. She changed the subject.
“I’ve got an idea how we may be able to tip off the authorities about Stephenson.”
Jennifer spun her chair to face Heather. “All right. I guess I’m ready to hear this.”
“I’m all ears,” said Mark, leaning forward in his own chair. “Uh, by the way, would you stop? I’m getting whiplash.”
Heather stopped pacing. “Sorry,” she said and sat down on the corner of Jennifer’s bed. “We can send an e-mail message to the National Security Agency.”
Jennifer’s jaw dropped open. “Have you completely lost your mind? They would trace an e-mail in a heartbeat, right back to our three little teenaged butts.”
Mark nodded. “I hope that isn’t the whole plan. I’d get plenty of workout time in the prison weight room.”
Heather scowled. “Of course that isn’t the whole plan. Do you honestly think I would spend a whole week coming up with that?”
“Just making sure the numbers in your head haven’t stopped adding up.”
Heather ignored the jibe. “We’ve got to get a message to someone in the government with the ability to look into highly classified stuff. And from what I’ve found out, the NSA is the king of the secret world. They have computers tracking every e-mail and phone call on the planet.”
Jennifer nodded. “Yes. And that makes it safe for us to e-mail them, how?”
“Look, I didn’t say it was going to be easy. What we’ll have to do is send the e-mail from an untraceable source.” Heather paused, looking directly at Jennifer. “We’ll have to hack our way into some remote system on the Internet, then drop a virus. The virus will send the e-mail after it has covered its tracks.”
“Oh great,” said Jennifer. “There are just a few problems with that scheme. First, it’s highly illegal.”
“Well, I think we burned that bridge a long time ago,” Mark injected.
“And,” Jennifer continued, “the government, along with major corporations, has gotten pretty darned good at tracking people putting viruses on the Internet. As a matter of fact, they catch almost all of them.”
“We’re just going to have to be better than those people,” said Heather with a shrug.
“And,” Jennifer continued, “last but not least, e-mail isn’t secure. When that message gets sent, every major government is going to know what it says, even if it’s addressed to the NSA. And you can bet Dr. Stephenson will find out.”
“I’ve been thinking hard about that. Let’s talk about the e-mail security first,” Heather said. “Anyway, the virus is going to have to sense when it has hopped around the net enough to send the e-mail. The e-mail needs to include an encrypted computer address containing where the real message is stored. The first one to break the encryption on that message will be the first one to find the computer where the real message is.”
“What if the NSA doesn’t break the code first?” asked Jennifer.
“They’re supposed to be the best in the world at that. We’ll just need to hope that the US government isn’t wasting all that money. They will also have one more slight advantage. Anyone else will have had to pick up the e-mail from spying on the net and identify it for analysis. That should put the others a little behind, since the NSA will directly receive the e-mail clue.”
Jennifer shook her head. “The NSA is supposed to have more PhD mathematicians than anyone else and the best code-cracking super computers. How can our encryption stand up to that?”
Heather grinned. “That’s the beauty of it. I’ve been reading up on encryption theory. The best schemes are mathematically based. That’s why all those mathematicians work at the NSA.”
“I feel much better now,” said Jennifer, making Mark chuckle.
“Don’t you see? Even though the encryption methods I could research were not the classified ones, they were produced by some pretty darn good mathematicians. And I can see the solutions, automatically, easily. I don’t even have to think about it.”
“Now you’re freaking me out,” said Mark.
Heather smiled. “And I can do far better.”
A sudden light dawned in Jennifer’s face. “So you come up with an encryption that is difficult, but not impossible to break. Then we encrypt the e-mail message and count on the NSA to crack it first. What about the back trace they’re going to put on our virus?”
Heather shrugged. “We’ll launch the virus from some public place. You’re going to have to come up with a way of countering their trace.”
“I don’t know. The guys hunting us will be the best in the business.”
“Yeah,” said Mark. “They’re going to be on our asses like pigs on shit.”
Jennifer frowned. “Lovely image.”
“We’ll need to be able to see how the back trace is coming,” Heather said.
Jennifer rubbed her chin. “I guess I could have the virus leave a little agent program on each infected computer before it jumps to the next. That little guy’s job would just be to report on his health by posting a code to some public chat site we could monitor.”
Heather’s eyes widened. “What a great idea. I could design an algorithm to generate a unique code for each agent. All it would need to contain would be a unique ID, a time stamp, and the address of the computer it was on.”
Mark rubbed his hands together. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Jen just has to monitor those codes to see when they drop off the net.”
Jennifer nodded. “But the antivirus companies are going to try to kill off our virus.”
“That won’t be a big problem,” said Heather. “We don’t need it to last forever, just long enough to send the clue e-mail.”
“Yes,” said Jennifer. “But as that antivirus starts wiping out our little agents, it will make it hard to tell whether or not they are dying from the trace or just from the antivirus.”
“Actually I think that will help us,” Heather said. “I’ll be able to spot the difference in the patterns.”
Mark stood up. “Problem solved then. Sounds like you two have some work to do.”
“Not yet, buddy boy,” said Heather. “A couple of last details. Our laptops and handheld computers are going to have incriminating data on them. I’ll come up with another encryption algorithm that I think will be unbreakable, and then I need Jen to add that to our virus program.”
A confused look settled on Jennifer’s face. “Add it to our virus? How does that have anything to do with protecting the data on our systems?”
A sly smile settled on Heather’s lips. “Look. It won’t work to just have a program on our machines that encrypts any data we don’t want others to know about. If someone looks on our computers and finds a bunch of data with a super sophisticated encryption scheme, they’ll just want to know where we got the encryption. Game over.”
“Okay?”
“We let the virus encrypt some data on every machine with the unbreakable code. On our machines it will encrypt important stuff. On everyone else’s computer, it’ll just encrypt random garbage.”
Jennifer clapped her hands. “Then if anyone snoops around, it just looks like we got an infection like everyone else.”
“Yes. We’ll just need to make sure we get our computers infected from the Internet after we launch our virus.”
Jennifer closed her eyes. After several seconds she opened them. “I think it’ll work.”
Mark walked over and patted each of them on the back. “That’s it then. You two hop right on it and report in to me with your progress.”
“Not quite,” said Heather with a smile. “I need you to do something for us.”
Mark shook his head. “Why doesn’t that shock me?”
Heather continued. “With your enhanced language skills, do you think you could learn some Russian?”
Mark perked up, looking intrigued. “Russian? That’s a rather odd choice, isn’t it? What have you got up your sleeve?”
“I haven’t got it all worked out yet. Can you just do it?”
Mark grinned. “Sounds mysterious. I’ll give it a shot.”
“Good,” said Heather. “Jen, I’ll try to have the algorithms ready for you tomorrow.”
Jennifer nodded. “In the meantime, I’ll make sure I know everything I can about computer worms and viruses. I want to feel comfortable before I write a single line of code.”
Mark paused at the door and glanced back at his sister.
“Doc, don’t wait until you’re comfortable. By that time the sun will be a red giant. We need something by the time Christmas vacation is over.”
The eraser she threw bounced harmlessly off the door as Mark ducked out of the room.