Re: [HOE] Decryption

[Robert Holland <robert@macauley.com>]

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>> My players recently came into possession of 3 data slugs that contain
>> heavily encrypted NA military data
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>> My question is: does anyone have any ideas about how to do this in-game?
>> Would the decryption equipment be hardware (junker-built AI or Brains
>> machine) or software (data slugs).
>> I generally do want them to succeed at getting this stuff, but it
>> shouldn't be too simple to actually do...
>>
>I got a couple of solutuions.
>
>1) make it a software program solution. A successful computer hacking roll
>(any difficulty you choose) would do it.

You could certainly do that, if it fits what you want to do with the adventure.
Keep in mind that top-flight military encryption is really really really really
REALLY REALLY REALLY hard to crack, as in it would take all the computers on the
planet working in parallel several thousand years to crack it by brute force,
and that's *before* the Last War destroyed 99.9% of all computers. Codes like
this don't have weaknesses that a brilliant hacker can look at and say "Ah, I
see how this works". From my point of view, good luck cracking one without at
least, say, an 80 on your hacking roll. (Frankly, I'd find it damn hard to deny
success to anyone who rolled an 80 on anything.) About the only practical (and I
use the term loosely) solution I can think of is a computer browser spirit's
legend chip power, the one that turns the entire Net into a massively parallel
processor at your disposal.

And hmm. That gives me an amusing idea for your adventure. Say some ex-military
dude tells the posse that there were only a few decryptors for this particular
cypher, and all but one of them caught nukes in the last days of the war. Our
heroes trek off to the aforementioned military base. Feel free to make the
journey and the entry as straightforward or deadly difficult as you like--either
way, the posse finally locates the machine...only to find it's been trashed
beyond repair. (Some enterprising junker scavenged the primary circuit board a
few years back.) As they trudge away in defeat, they recall the words of a loopy
old junker back in the 'Yard who said that the Net could crack their code in a
few hours if it really wanted to...so now they just have to figure out how to do
a big enough favor for the denizens of the Net that they'll be willing to repay
them by cracking the code. Fun fun fun.

--Robert Holland