At six Vlad took the case out to the porch again. Cooper came with him without being asked.
It was dark already under the trees. The cold had come down off the ridge and settled in the yard. He set the dish on the rail, powered his tablet, and opened nib’s issue tracker while the dish looked for satellites. He wanted to see who else had found the sigma.
The bars came up. The page loaded.
Four hundred and twelve new issues since six o’clock that morning in New York.
PQ1 is a backdoor. Change my mind.
sigma is a backdoor lol
Why does my HSM say “nib” in the logs, is this the NSA
Build fails on Alpine 3.24 with -Werror (please fix, urgent, rotation)
Has anyone actually checked the math on this or are we all just trusting it
The last one had twenty-seven thumbs-up and no answer. It had been filed at 9:14 in the morning, Eastern, by somebody with no picture.
Nobody had figured out his involvement.
He powered the dish down at three minutes and forty seconds and stood at the rail with the tablet in his hand.
Eight years. Every signature his code had ever made had verified. Nobody had ever filed an issue against the sampler.
He went back inside. Samantha was on the floor behind the stove with her tablet and Doug’s notebook. Seth was asleep sitting up against the door with the atlas on his chest. Marcus was asleep on the couch with his bad foot on the milk crate and one arm over his eyes.
“Anything?” Samantha asked without looking up.
“Four hundred people are angry at nib. None of them are right.”
“Lucky for nib.”
He sat down in Doug’s chair. Samantha had her hair pulled back with a rubber band from the kitchen drawer. She was still writing numbers down in the margin of the notebook and then crossing them out. She had been doing that for almost two hours.
“Who copies the small key’s file to make the big key and doesn’t check the one number that matters?” she said to the notebook.
“Somebody in a hurry.”
“Somebody lazy.”
“Also possible,” said Vlad.
At ten to eight she put the pencil down.
“Two point two,” she said.
“Million.”
“Million. I did a key twice as big as the last one. It moves less every time I double it. Two point two, give or take.”
“Give or take how much?”
“If I’m wrong it’s on the low side. But I’m not wrong.”
Low meant sooner. Nobody at Ostvik could have done what she had just done with a pencil and a borrowed tablet.
At eight he took the dish out again. Ostvik’s page said one million two hundred and sixty thousand, as of ten in New York. Eighty thousand an hour since four. Two point two million was another twelve hours. Eight in the morning, Mountain.
When he came back in he said, “Eight in the morning.”
“I got eight fifteen,” Samantha said without looking up. “You rounded down.”
He knew how the people breaking R2 worked, because he would have done it the same way. They had a team and a room full of machines. They were watching everything Ostvik did, because they were going to have to beat it. Somebody on that team would find the log. Somebody would do what Samantha had done with a pencil by a woodstove, except faster, and with more computers. By lunch tomorrow they would have PQ1’s key. By the end of the week they would have R2. On Day 10 the devices would stop listening to R2 and believe only PQ1, and the other side would already be holding it.
Fuck.
The fix was still one number. A fixed sampler would stop new signatures from leaking. It could not do anything about the million and a quarter already in the log. Every hour from now was another eighty thousand.
Ostvik had to stop signing until nib was fixed. Nothing else was fast enough.
He wrote the issue on his tablet at nine, in Doug’s chair, with the dish off. At ten he went out for a third time. He made a new account on the tracker and gave it a name that was eleven random letters. He pasted in what he had written.
The FN-DSA-1024 sampler uses FN-DSA-512’s sigma (165.7366171829776; the standard says 168.38857144654395). Signatures verify. They also leak the key. Measurement attached. Every PQ1 signature in the public log is affected. Recommend Ostvik pause PQ1 signing until this is fixed. Patch is one line.
He attached the patch. He didn’t press Submit. He powered the dish down with the page still open and read it at the rail.
He pretended he was the person on the other end. It was midnight in New York on the first night of the rotation. A brand-new account with a random name was asking nib to change one number in its sampler, and asking the people signing everything in the country to stop. It was exactly what an attacker would send.
Changes to the sampler needed two maintainers to approve them and a signed commit from a contributor they knew. Nobody would merge this. He wouldn’t have merged it either.
The only contributor nib had ever known for that file was kolobok. Kolobok’s signing key was on an old laptop in a box in his room in Basalt, under the bed, next to the go bag, unless federal agents had already taken everything away.
If the Feds had imaged that laptop, they had kolobok. The name would take them to the man in Belgrade and then to his mother’s door.
He sat down on the step with the cold coming through his jeans. Cooper pushed his nose under Vlad’s hand and left it there.
At midnight Samantha was asleep on the floor with the notebook under her cheek. He took the pencil out of her hand and closed it inside the notebook.
Marcus was still on the couch with his arm over his eyes. Marcus would put his name on anything. Nobody at nib had ever heard of Marcus either.
At two he went out one more time and sat with the tablet on his knees and the draft still open. The patch had an author line at the top, and it said eleven letters that meant nothing. Putting kolobok there would get the patch read, because it was the one name nib knew for that file. Without the key it proved nothing, and it would put the name on the internet the same week the other side was reading everything. He put the cursor in the author line and deleted the eleven letters. He typed kolobok and looked at it, and deleted that too.
He was stuck and didn’t know what he wanted to do. And he was pissed at himself for even being in this position. Plus, Cooper was drooling on his leg.