Street Game (GhostWalkers, #8)(71)

Javier snorted. “He doesn’t know how to stay up all night.”

“Are you getting anywhere? Paul seems to think you’ll have a bit of a problem. I told him he was crazy and you’d have this thing spilling secrets to you.” He gave her a hopeful smile. “I was telling the truth, wasn’t I?”

“We blew past the operating system password,” Javier said. “It wasn’t that hard. Virtually all laptops made in the last few years contain Firewire ports.”

Mack scowled at him. “I’ll take back the coffee if you don’t speak English.”

Javier shrugged and grinned. “One of those ‘holes’ you can plug cables into along one of the sides of the laptop. If the Firewire port is enabled, and the laptop is using the Windows operating system, you can break into the laptop via the Firewire port.”

“So we just needed to connect another computer—running a Linux operating system instead of Windows—to the enabled Firewire port on the laptop,” Jaimie explained. “The machine is then tricked into allowing the connected computer to have read and write access to its memory. We then ran a special program on our computer that found the log-in password in the laptop’s memory. Then we logged in using that password.”

“And we thoroughly vetted all the programs. He’s got quite a few he modified, and he’s good. But then we found this.” Javier indicated the screen. “He’s got himself what has to be a classified program. We normally wouldn’t have a problem breaking into it, but we were expecting a normal-length password, not this.”

“I don’t understand.” He hated those three words. And he often had to use them around Jaimie and her precious computers.

Jaimie flashed her world-class smile. “Well, Mack, here’s the thing. Encryption techniques are now so powerful that it’s virtually impossible to intercept encrypted files or e-mail messages in transit and decode them. The weak point in security systems is always at the place where someone accesses an encrypted file or e-mail message. Usually this is a matter of entering a password chosen by the person. And because people aren’t very good at choosing secure passwords, it’s not too hard to break into their files. It’s not so much that they base their passwords on things other people might guess. It’s more that their passwords are too short. In fact, if their password is made of letters and numbers and is less than twenty-three characters long, I can run a special program off a supercomputer that will test every possible combination, and be able to find their password within a few hours.”

Javier nodded. “And—even though all the security specialists recommend it—we’ll never be able to convince most people to choose random passwords with more than twenty-three characters.” He winked at Mack. “Bet your password isn’t more than twenty-three characters.”

“I lived with Jaimie for a year. Believe me, I can barely remember the damned thing it has so many letters and numbers.”

Jaimie smirked at him. “You can always ask me if you ever forget it.”

Mack rolled his eyes. “I told you it was useless. She can get into my computer.”

Javier grinned at him. “I don’t think you’re ever going to get away with sending hot e-mails to Internet babes.”

“Another approach people have tried is biometrics: using the unique characteristics of a person’s biology to allow only that person, or a group of people, to have access to something,” Jaimie continued, giving Javier a warning kick beneath the desk. “The most familiar use of biometrics is retinal scanning: You place your eyeball in front of a retinal scanner, it measures various features of a person’s retina against a database that stores the retinal info for legitimate people.”

Javier put down his coffee. “We’re all familiar with retinal scanners as a way of limiting access to sections of buildings. But you can add retinal scanning to a computer as well, as a way of making sure that only you are allowed access to your computer or to certain files. A major drawback is that you have to add this ‘retinal scanning’ hardware—a special device you press your eyeball up against. You can’t just run a program on your computer. In addition, there are horror stories that go along with this technology, like security breakins being accomplished by cutting out a person’s eyeball and holding it up to a retinal scanner . . .” Javier wiggled his eyebrows to look evil.

“Unfortunately”—Jaimie gave a little shudder—“that really does work.”

“Can I just bring the kid down here and shove his eye at the computer, or do you need me to really cut it out?” Mack asked, straight-faced.

Jaimie made a face at him. “I don’t think we need to do anything quite so drastic. My PhD dissertation introduced a new approach that combines the idea of generating more secure passwords with the idea behind biometrics: coming up with a unique identifier for each person. Here’s the idea. Just like a person’s retina or fingerprint, everyone’s brain is unique. In particular, everyone has memories that no one else has. If we could identify a unique memory for a person, and find a way to express it in the form of a sequence of words—enough words to be secure of—we’d have a password no one could ever break. The program would be a terrific new tool for security without requiring the extra hardware that biometric approaches like retinal scanning does, and without having to remember an impossibly long sequence of random letters and numbers. I call it ‘mememetrics’—because, in contrast with biometrics, it’s based on unique memories rather than unique biological characteristics.”