Note: Ten chapters, 30,000 words! I wasn't expecting the story to grow this large.
TrueCrypt is an open-source partition/disk encryption program. Purportedly, even the United States' FBI could not crack a TrueCrypt partition after several months of trying billions of passwords on a massive parallel scale. (As of a few years ago, anyway.)
LUKS is a type of encrypted partition common on Linux computers.
A hash is a representation (usually a number as a string of hexadecimal characters) of a password generated by a one-way function, with the input being the password itself. The hash is computed when a user first sets the password and is the only password information stored. Then, when the user types in the password to log in, the computer computes the hash of the attempted password against the stored password hash. If they match, access is granted. The same hash function has to be used throughout. The idea is that it is nearly impossible to find the password from the hash without brute forcing (trying many passwords until one is found that generates the same hash), so the hash can safely be stored in a database.
Since most hash functions are very, very quick to compute, a common method of slowing down such brute forcing is to run the hash function iteratively over the input many times. This is key (hash) stretching. This dramatically increases the time it takes to attempt many passwords. Testing 500,000 passwords per second may be reasonable for brute-forcing. Testing 1 password per second, not so much.
Aaron Swartz was a real-life hacker in the United States. He committed suicide after the United States government leveraged an exceedingly broad and poorly-defined law, the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) against him. He was facing more than three decades in prison for downloading academic articles from JSTOR because he used an automatic "spider" program to do it, even after JSTOR and MIT attempted to block his downloads. The attention received from his death resulted in a minor reform in the CFAA, and some organizations are pressing for more limitations on the act.
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Happy 4th of July to those of you in the United States!
Thank you so much for all the reviews! They are love.
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One Year and Seven Months Prior
It was common knowledge at the Landis offices that I fell into a trance-like fugue whenever I tackled a particularly intriguing programming project. No matter if it was implementing a unique algorithm, upgrading an old subroutine, or hunting down a bug with extreme prejudice, I often lost all track of time and withdrew from the outside world, focused myself entirely on solving the issue at hand. I paid no attention to the going-ons around me. By now, most of my coworkers had learned that they needed to tap me on the shoulder or wave a hand in front of my face to get my attention; otherwise I would inadvertently ignore them for who-knew-how-long. (The record: the shy receptionist had once stood next to my chair for fifteen minutes waiting for me to notice him.)
This made it really easy to sneak up on me.
It was afternoon and I was in full bug-squashing mode. I had already resolved one issue ticket since my lunch break—a simple two-line fix to correct a careless mistake made by someone else in the embedded web server code, a problem that took much longer to find than to fix—and I so very nearly had a patch ready for the second issue.
I yawned, stretched, turned in my chair, and jumped ever so slightly when I noticed that someone was leaning on my desk. Someone who had not been there the last time I had checked. Someone who was wearing a fine black suit, a crisp, white shirt, and a charismatic little smirk.
The smile just refused to stay off my face.
"John," I said, keeping my voice low so as not to attract attention from the rest of the office. Fortunately, everyone was bustling today. "How did you get back here?"
"I...breached the space-time continuum," he said in that soft, husky voice of his. I found it difficult to keep the snort of laughter from escaping.
"Okay, Doctor. How long have you been sitting there? I kinda don't notice things when I'm working."
"Not too long," he said, setting a steaming paper cup on my desk, respectfully far away from the keyboard. I glared at it. Tried to convince myself that I wasn't craving the taste of that spicy black tea, sweetened just a touch by a dab of honey. I held out about five seconds before I reached out for the cup, making a dramatic, exasperated sigh.
"What'cha want me to hack this time?" I said.
Reese raised his eyebrows. "It's just tea, Elizabeth. I buy you tea all the time. What makes you think I want you to hack something today?"
"You just called me 'Elizabeth' instead of 'Ellie' to put me in a better mood. Where is the computer? Are we going to break into someone's house again?"
"Only if you're comfortable doing that."
"It's fine, I just wanted to know ahead of time."
"Ellie—" John said.
I narrowed my eyes, but said nothing.
"—burglary is illegal. So is hacking. Now, I'm fine with being an outlaw, but you've got a promising, well-paying, entirely legal career ahead of you."
"Only thanks to you," I said. "John, whatever you need, I'll do it. I want to help. I don't care what happens to me."
"That's what I'm afraid of."
"I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you. I'm living on time I shouldn't even have." I shrugged. "I want to use it to help people." Motioning to the computer monitor, I said, "This firmware can't help someone chained up and left to die. Or someone who's being blackmailed by their business partner over a sex tape."
"What about a future project? Something that you might program five, ten, fifteen years down the line?"
I chuckled. "Like what? What could I possibly make that would affect peoples' lives the way you do?"
"Oh, I could think of a few things," John said. He had this sort of sneaky little grin on his face, like he knew something I didn't.
"What, some sort of program that saves peoples' lives? Maybe I'll make a way to upload our brains into computers, so we can live forever. Or, maybe I'll make a program like the precogs from Minority Report and predict the future so we can stop crime before it happens." I smiled wryly and shook my head. "That's not the kind of thing I can do, John. I'm a good programmer, but I'm not some sort of super hacker."
John stayed silent, eyebrows raised. I took a long, leisurely sip of my tea.
"You need to know what's at stake," he said finally. "You could be throwing away your entire career. You could be sent to prison. The punishment for hacking is tough—if you're caught."
"I know," I said. "I read about Aaron Swartz and MIT." With a few keystrokes, I saved my work, closed my open windows, and logged out of my workstation. Leaning back in my chair, I crossed my arms. "John, look. My life should've ended five months ago. I don't care what happens to me now. And I want to help you. Okay?"
"Only if you swear to me that you'll tell me if I ask you to do something that makes you uncomfortable."
"Fine. Deal. I swear." I stood, adjusted the straps on one of my sandals. "Where's the computer, Q?"
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Turns out it was in an upscale apartment on the nineteenth floor of a downtown high-rise. The hallway outside was well-lit and quiet. John glanced left and right, acting all casual, as he picked the lock. It took him eight seconds.
"You make it look so easy," I whispered as he pushed the door open. He glanced around inside, then motioned me in, closing the door behind me.
"I could teach you, if you'd like," he said.
"And here you were all concerned about me turning into a criminal."
"Nothing wrong with knowing how to pick a lock, Ellie. The skill comes in useful on occasion for legitimate purposes."
A hazy memory flashed before my eyes: John leaning over my overheated, naked body. His nimble fingers working a paperclip into the locks on the handcuffs that bound my numb wrists to the metal bar above my head.
"Yeah." I mumbled. "Yeah, it does."
It was a cramped, sparse little apartment. Hardly anything on the walls. White carpet. White leather couch. Tiny coffee table. A few tall, willowy fake plants in the corners. One whole wall of the living room was given up to windows, letting the afternoon sunlight flood in.
John directed me to the bedroom, which was decorated much the same way. The computer in question was at a large desk near the window. It was a squat desktop tower, all rounded edges and shiny black metal. The company logo lit up in neon red and blue when I turned it on. It booted from my flash drive without complaint, but when I accessed the hard drive, I could tell right away that I wasn't going to be able to do much.
"I think this guy has an encrypted partition on his hard drive," I said, disappointed.
"She's a girl," John said lightly. He was sitting on the floor beside me. "With good security habits, its seems. Can you decrypt it?"
"I don't know. Lemme see what kind of encryption it is first."
I had tools on my flash drive that could brute-force some types of drive encryption passphrases given enough time, plus I had several gigabytes worth of wordlists to help the process along. But certain encryption techniques used hash stretching and other tricks to make each passphrase computationally expensive to test—a LUKS partition, for example, by default hashed the input passphrase repeatedly for around a second before it tried using the output to decrypt the partition. At that rate, the universe would end before I found the passphrase, even if I ran the operation in parallel on all of my home computers.
"It's a TrueCrypt partition," I said, feeling my shoulders hunch. "I'll try some common passwords, but I don't think I can get in." I sighed. "Sorry, John."
"Just do your best," he said calmly. "If it doesn't work, we'll just clone it to my external hard drive. I know a guy who might be able crack it."
"What, he work for the NSA or something?"
"We'll go with 'something'," John said. "He's good with computers."
For a little while, there was silence in the apartment but for the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard, the chattering of the hard drive, the whir of the desktop cooling fan. So far, none of the passphrases the tool had tried had succeeded in accessing the drive. I explored the unencrypted portions of the hard drive while I waited, but there was very little of interest to be found.
When the cracking application had gone through its tiny "common password" wordlist with no success, I knew that there was little point in continuing. So, I started the drive cloning and leaned back in the chair to watch the progress bar crawl across the screen. I sighed. Shuffled my sandals on the carpet. Spun the chair lazily from side to side. There was nothing more to do until the clone program finished.
After a few minutes of silence, I said, "Hey, John?"
"Yes, Ellie?"
"Why do you do it?"
John looked at me. "Why do I do what?"
"Save people. What made you decide to become Batman?"
His mouth quirked. "My parents were murdered right in front of me in an alleyway."
I rolled my eyes. "Seriously?"
"No." He looked away.
"All right, nevermind."
I turned my attention back to the progress bar, which had inched about halfway across the screen. For a little while, there was quiet.
"Someone found me," John said. His eyes, focused on the opposite wall of the room, had a vacant, far-away look to them.
"Huh?"
"I was in a bad way," he said, his voice raspy. "Lost. On the street. Probably would've been dead in another few days, maybe a few weeks." He nodded his head sadly. "Someone rescued me. He pulled me back. Gave me a purpose."
"Sounds like we're kinda alike," I said.
"Not really," John said, smiling, but he left it at that.
It took another ten minutes to copy the partitions to John's external hard drive. When I was done, I shut down the computer and put my thumb drive back in my bag. We left the apartment, walked to the lift, and stepped inside.
While we waited for the lift to reach the ground floor, I said, "Sorry I couldn't get into the partition."
"It's alright, Ellie. Most of the time, all I can do is clone the drive."
"And take it back to your NSA guy?"
"Pretty much."
"I hope you buy him tea, too."
John chuckled. "He does enjoy his tea..."
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The next time John and I broke into someone's place, the plan went...sideways.
It started out fine. The apartment was a funky old tenement in Hell's Kitchen; a tiny one-room dwelling. It stank of cigarette smoke and it looked like someone else had broken in already and turned the place on its ear. The walls were painted dark green and whenever I stepped on the shaggy brown carpet it released little puffs of dust. There were dirty dishes scattered everywhere.
"Nice place," I said to John.
The computer keyboard was sticky with food and spilled drinks and goodness-knew-what-else, and it was surrounded by empty beer bottles. The desktop tower on the floor was covered in dust and cigarette ash, and when I turned it on, it emitted a loud grinding noise—I recognized the sound as the death knell of a failing cooling fan. I wondered how many inches of dust had collected inside the case. Someone needed to take this computer out to the pasture and shoot it. It would've been a mercy killing.
I said as much, but I dutifully inserted the flash drive and booted the computer. It took five minutes to load an operating system that should've been up and running in thirty seconds. Typing as little as possible, I began to explore the hard drive.
That's when the lock clicked.
"Stay back," John hissed, just as the door swung open. I had a brief glimpse of a man at least six feet tall and entirely too muscled, and then the intruder was bellowing and running at John, who had placed himself between me and the door.
John deflected the first few blows and managed to land a solid one on the guy's ribs, forcing the guy backwards, but Mr. Muscular Bald Wife-beater wasn't about to keel over and beg for mercy. No, he punched John in the face, or tried to. John deflected it, but the blow still glanced off his cheek.
I stood there frozen and watched them fight, my mouth agape. I wanted to help John, but didn't know what to do.
The two men separated. The intruder snarled and ran at John again. This time, John was ready, and for a few seconds it looked like he was kicking the intruder's ass.
And then the other guy showed up—a near clone of the first man, but with a little more hair and a little more patience. He started for John first, but then he noticed lil' ol' me in the corner and began stalking my way.
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, I thought, like a looping record at double speed. Heart pounding, I did the only thing that I could think of—I grabbed one of the beer bottles from the desk and threw it.
It missed the guy, hit John's back, and bounced off. The guy coming towards me grinned.
Double oh shit!
I grabbed another bottle, aimed more carefully. This one hit the guy on the head with a satisfyingly solid thunk.
"Oww! Fucking bitch!"
I picked up another bottle, held it high, and raised my eyebrows, but apparently a scrawny young woman wearing a dress and holding up an empty beer bottle isn't very threatening, even if she's got her eyebrows raised. The man lunged, and the bottle missed. My frantic fingers closed around another bottle. The man was almost on me, his hands outstretched, reaching for my neck. I could smell his foul breath. I struggled to swing the bottle.
His fingers closed around my throat, but before they could squeeze, the man suddenly jerked and fell forward, plowing right into the desk and scattering beer bottles everywhere. John stood where the man had been a moment before. He was breathing hard. His hair was all tousled and his shirt was wrinkled. A shiner was forming just above his left eye.
Behind him, the first guy was lying face-down on the floor.
"Are you alright?" he asked.
"Y—yeah. I'm fine." My heart was still thumping away like a jackhammer.
"See if you can find a roll of tape. And close the door."
I started pulling open desk drawers. There was a roll of packing tape in the second one. I tossed it to John, who began to restrain the two men.
By the time one of them woke up, they were thoroughly immobilized and gagged. John stood over them, waited for them both to return to consciousness, and then pulled out his gun. I gulped. Surely he wasn't going to...?
"Which one of you is Anthony Vaughn?" The men glanced at each other. When neither of them responded, John pointed the gun at the one on the left—the one that had entered first—and said, casually, "It's you, isn't it?"
The man's eyes flew wide and he shook his head frantically, yelling into the crude gag.
"Or maybe it's you," John said, swinging the gun to point at the other man, who tried to squirm away. John stopped that by stepping on his chest. "Yes, it's you. I recognize you better when you're not trying to assault my partner. You should be thankful she doesn't have a mark on her, else you'd be in a world of hurt right now. Those court-ordered anger management courses didn't do you much good, did they?"
John's gaze was withering.
"The truth is, Anthony, I don't really care who you are. What I care about is that you never, ever approach Catherine Mendoza or her family again. You will never contact her again. In fact, you will pack your things tonight and leave. Both of you. You will move very, very far away and never, ever come back. Do you understand?"
The man nodded quickly yes, but John wasn't done yet. He pulled the slide back on his gun and aimed the barrel right between Anthony's eyes.
I savored the look of fear on his face, but at the same time, I really hope this was just a scare tactic and not a prelude to murder.
"Just to make sure it gets through that thick head of yours, Anthony: you will not contact Catherine Mendoza again. Do you know what will happen if you do?"
John clicked off the safety, and the man's muffled pleas doubled in intensity.
"If you do," John whispered, "if you even so think about calling her again, I will find you. I will hunt you down and kill you like the animal you are. The same goes for your pal here." John glanced over at the other man, who cringed when the barrel swung his way.
"Do you both understand?"
They nodded so fast, they probably were giving themselves whiplash.
"I'll be back tomorrow," John said, clicking the safety on his gun and lowering it. "Just to make sure you don't need any help...packing."
Turning to me, he said, "I think it's time we left, Ellie."
I didn't need to be told twice. I grabbed my flash drive and we left the apartment, leaving the two bound men to struggle.
My voice didn't return until we were in the car, headed safely out of the neighborhood.
"Oh my god," I said.
"He didn't hurt you, did he?" John glanced at my neck. "Because if he did, I'll turn this car around and—"
"No, no, I'm fine," I said. "I'm just—I've never seen a fight up close before."
"You need to work on your aim a little."
"Sorry about that," I mumbled.
"No worries. It was quick thinking. Most people freeze up when they see a two hundred and fifty pound guy running at them. It was better than standing still and letting him come at you."
"Thanks," I said, not sure what else to say.
"But, if we're going to keep doing this, Ellie, I need to teach you some self-defense moves. Assuming you still want—"
"Yes, I still want to help," I said, before John could try talking me out of our hacking adventures again. "I'd love to learn."
"Good," John said, smirking. "I know a place we can practice this weekend if I don't have a case. If you're not busy, of course..."
"Count me in," I said.
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Note again: I can't get the image of Elizabeth trying to look intimidating with a beer bottle out of my head!