Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3376 - 3380 (19th to 23rd December 2016)
Neko_Ali:
There is no particular reason for CW to do anything to Jeremy though, as far as we know. When we last saw them, she was feeling quite self satisfied and Jeremy was wisely keeping his thoughts to himself. Right now Bubbles is probably in the best position she's going to be in the knowable future for getting out from under CW's thumb. Whether it's for betraying her now, or if CW decides that ten years wasn't enough when time runs out, she's not giving the key back, ever. Without that, she has no hold over Bubbles, so she has no reason to give it back, other than to keep her word. Something I have no trust in her doing. So either Bubbles needs to accept that the locked memories are gone, or she turns to Hanner's contacts. Which I'm surprised that Faye hasn't mention she knows the daughter of the guy who invented AIs... Between him and Station they've got the best chance of anyone to break the encryption on Bubbles memories. Assuming this hasn't been CW lying the entire time.
Thrudd:
And that is just it - if the idea of CW having the key is all that is needed then there is no need to keep the actual key.
Heck the memories might not even be locked and encrypted but only partitioned behind a door that Bubbles is to afraid to even try to open.
Again the idea and suggestion is all that is required for the ruse to work and the key is a just blank file.
Is it cold in here?:
If Station can decrypt something without knowing the key then so can the NSA and anybody who can rent a botnet. Nobody's going to use an algorithm that vulnerable for anything they care about.
The skills required here are Susan Calvin's. Station might be very good at that.
wlewisiii:
I acrtually agree that even station can't hack the key by brute force. No, what Station can hack is _CW_. There are no defenses, no "Black Ice" for those of you who remember Neuromancer, that could stand between her and an AI with the strength of station. Station could walk in and like in Walter Jon Williams' tale "hand that texan his as*hole"
If you can break the ai holding the key, the strength of the key is irrelevant. This has always been true and is why physical security is a small part of overall security.
Morituri:
For anybody who's not in on the joke, Here's a page with a good explanation of who "Alice and Bob" are:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/tivoli/tutorials/s-crypto/s-crypto.html
Theyre stock names for the participants in any crypto protocol. Pretty much every textbook on crypto uses these names. Alice is the name assigned to the actor who initiates the protocol, and Bob is the name assigned to the actor who receives the first protocol message (the one sent by Alice).
'Eve' is the eavesdropper who tries to penetrate private communications.
If you have a complicated protocol, there are more stock names like Carol, Dave, Eunice, Fred, Gina ...... Xavier, Yvette, Zebulon, for further honest participants.
If you have different kinds of attacks there are different standard names for the opponents mounting those attacks: Trent is the 'trusted' server (Trusted, in this sense, means the actor who can screw you over by acting in bad faith - usually a central server that everyone relies on, like a mail server handling unencrypted mail, or a cloud backup company with backdoor keys). Mallory is the opponent who can alter messages in flight, like someone who's hacked your home router. Trudy is the intruder who tries to gain illicit access to something, like the opponent who's still trying to hack your home router. Harold and Nancy are relatively recent additions - Harold is the hardware manufacturer who can manufacture things with hidden backdoors or stupid default passwords, and Nancy is the nation state actor which performs pervasive surveillence and can also use force of law to force an otherwise trustworthy Trent or Harold to act in bad faith.
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