Gotcha.
21
Professor David Wang closed the ornate wooden door behind him and stepped out into the brisk morning air. For the first time in months, since he had begun taking morning tea with the University President, he felt hopeful and content. It had been a long journey from his poor upbringing in Heilongjiang province to receiving tenure at long last, but that wasn’t why he walked with a bounce in his step.
At the end of the sidewalk, David turned right and strolled down the well-manicured hillside on the southern edge of campus. Trees of various shapes and sizes — there were over five hundred diverse and distinct species on campus — towered around him, obscuring the surrounding hillsides that disappeared in the low-hanging clouds. But, unlike most mornings, he allowed his mind to wander away from the beauty of nature and settle on his work.
He admitted the first iteration of the waveform had used brute force to attack the fifth-generation fighter’s network encryption, much like the 2017 collision attack by CWI Amsterdam and Google against SHA-1. When Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, the Dutch national research center for mathematics and computer science, discredited Secure Hash Algorithm 1, the world of cryptography changed.
Unlike then, his goal now was to break the encryption without letting the Americans know. Because if they knew, they would change their encryption method completely and he would lose the advantage. If he wanted his weapon to work, he needed to be careful how he approached it.
David entered the building and walked quietly to his dank office, a room that had an almost closet-like feeling to it compared to some of the roomier office spaces of more senior professors. He didn’t mind it, though, as most of his students and fellow faculty knew he was more likely to be found outside enjoying the California weather than stuck inside. That made it one of the more secure places for him to undertake such work, since it was unlikely somebody would come looking for him there and disturb him while he focused on the task at hand.
He sat down at his desk and powered on his computer. He knew it didn’t come close to possessing the power required to alter the waveform from its current state to one that would withstand the Joint Strike Fighter’s advanced defenses — the defenses that had successfully repelled their most recent attack. Fortunately, his position in the university gave him access to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as EC2, a secure and scalable cloud-computing service that he could leverage to run his program.
Powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, Amazon EC2 P4d instances were deployed in hyperscale clusters that allowed him to rent only as much computing power as was required to complete the task. And since his department often used this service, he could charge the cost to the university and further shield his work from the prying eyes of American law enforcement or the National Security Agency. Not that they would even have a clue what to look for, but for added security, he logged in under one of his colleague’s accounts.
Each UltraCluster performed like the most powerful supercomputer in the world, and after entering the test results into his program and uploading it to the cloud, David leaned back in his chair and watched it perform the work for him with growing unease. He had scaled the processing power such that he knew the program would deliver results in less than an hour, but he couldn’t stand the thought of sitting in his office any longer than he had to.
David turned off the monitor and pushed back from his desk. A leisurely stroll around the campus would suit him well and give him a chance to show his face while he hacked into America’s most advanced stealth fighter.
A short while later, David sat on a bench outside the faculty offices on the east side of Centennial Lawn, watching the sun trace a path upward through one of his favorite trees on campus. The lone Queensland kauri stood over forty feet tall and cast an elegant shadow across the grass. It was the perfect place to sit and wait for the Amazon EC2 UltraClusters to finish crunching his program and produce the final waveform.
There had been a time early in his career when he felt conflicted about the work he did for the Ministry. He had always considered himself an academic above anything else, earning his bachelor’s at Harbin Institute of Technology and master’s at Shanghai University. It wasn’t until he had finished his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University that the Ministry approached him about conducting research on their behalf. Of course he said yes. He was Chinese and always would be.
He squinted as a ray of sunlight broke through the branches and caught him in its warm glow. He had traced the movement of the sun through the tree’s branches, trying to ignore how much time had elapsed since he started running the program. He was content just sitting outside, breathing in the fresh air, and enjoying the sun’s caress on his skin.
His phone vibrated, and he removed it from his pocket and saw a notification that the program was complete.
He didn’t smile, didn’t pump his fist in celebration, and didn’t hasten to leave one of his favorite places. He simply slipped his phone back into his pocket and stood, letting his spine elongate with a deep inhale of satisfaction and long exhale of contentment. Then, he walked west across the grass and placed his hand on the tree’s trunk, thanking it for the beauty it provided.
His office in the computer science building was less than a five-minute walk, just on the other side of the Engineering East building. He took his time, walking with his regular gait that was easily spotted by other faculty and students alike.
“Hey, Professor Wang!”
He turned to see one of his former students, a sophomore, he thought, offering him a friendly wave as she walked into the Baker Science building. He returned the gesture with a genuine smile but continued to his destination without another thought. She wouldn’t feel slighted by his response. It was just his way.
He turned into his building at the southeast corner of Dexter Lawn and took the stairs down to his basement office. Most of those who had shared the level with him were either away on sabbatical or had moved to more comfortable spaces with windows that looked out on the beautiful campus. But David never saw the need because he spent so little time there.
He unlocked his office door and reached in to flip on the light before stepping inside. He didn’t bother locking the door behind him and walked across to his desk, where he sat down in the uncomfortable office chair and turned on his computer monitor. As expected, the results were waiting for him, and he quickly scanned through the program’s output, looking for an obvious reason why the first iteration had failed.
“Ahhh… there you are.”
He saw it almost right away and chastised himself for missing something so painfully obvious. He had designed the weapon to target the JSF’s Autonomic Logistics Information System, known as ALIS, the first-generation cloud-based information exchange that was designed to allow the jet to transmit performance data back to those who maintained it. But after fielding several iterations of the flailing system, the US military had adopted ODIN, the Operational Data Integrated Network.
The results from the previous night’s mission showed that the waveforms still targeted much of the older system’s architecture and hadn’t been adapted for its replacement. Of course, he should have predicted that, but with the pace at which the Navy and Marine Corps upgraded their fleets, he didn’t see how he could have known which environment they were operating in. But with this latest waveform, he was certain they would be able to complete their mission.