Phi Episode 4: Cryptic and Creepy

Hey there! It's been a long time since I shared a new episode (Glad to know no one cares:)). As you would soon read why, I had no idea my quest to decipher this terrible message would become so personal and messed up. I am hesitant to continue writing and sharing what transpired, but I can’t keep this to myself, and I want him to know that he can't manipulate me (or maybe he can, I'm not sure (again, you’ll understand what I mean in due course)). If you're reading this, Psypher, I want you to know that you should suffer for whatever you did, and I'm not sure if I can undo your actions; all I know is that I don't want to end up like you. Perhaps rewriting this story might affect my path. Anyway, back to the instant I received the previous message– 

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I warned you about the dream in the previous message (wink-wink), which makes me look so cool and crypy*, right? 

;)

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Whatever is CRYPY?

"CRYPY is a web application that lets you encrypt and decrypt text content. It takes in a random whole number and a message. Two outputs of this algorithm for the same input text will be different if the given whole numbers are different. This is ensured by taking the hash of the number and using it in the key to encrypt the text. The underlying encryption algorithm is AES-256. Decryption works similarly."

As my old school friend, Vector would explain. 

~Flashback time~

It all began when we were young and naive, when the world seemed too bright, and the darkness seemed to escape the night. With fantasy fueling a fake reality, Vector and Scipher (for that is my corny pretentious stage persona) were the two leads of a story that almost didn't get published. 

The schoolboys always thought that they were part of a bigger picture and that they would indubiously be rich and famous. That power was but a matter of time. They were serious, and in their arrogant but innocent mindset, they thought that it was imperative to protect the privacy of their make-believe conversations, which in hindsight was just a distraction from their pathetic lives. The young wannabe programmers decided to build a program to help them encrypt their day-to-day conversations.

But why Cryptography?

Cryptography is used to protect sensitive, private, confidential pieces of information from the thirsty eyes of prowling cybercriminals who will take advantage of any weak links and use the unguarded information as blackmail or as a symbol of authority. Cryptography also ensures safe transactions, authenticates identity, prevents document tampering, and much more. For the schoolboys though, it was important because once they become rich and famous, their offhand rendezvous shouldn't pose a threat to their rise in power.

How the name of CRYPY came to be

One of the degenerate programmers–me–decided to name the program CRYPY, an unintelligent wordplay on the words cryptic and creepy. It was an attempt to free ourselves from the rote learning culture of an education system designed to program their students to be competitive and petty, to apply our programming knowledge to do something worthlessly meaningful instead of sculpting our vomit on our test papers. Bypassing the conventional norms of using cryptography to hide information, we trespassed into a more profound realm where we used cryptography to share information instead.

CRYPY's Fate

The schoolboys kept pretending to live their fantasies and eventually realized that their reality was a cryptic joke of the greatest comedian ever to exist– the world. They parted ways, one (Vector) went to study the science of computers (they all do these days, isn’t it), and the other (the great Scipher, of course) went to study physics. Vector soon realized that CRYPY was perhaps the crappiest code he wrote in his programming career. He didn't want his name besmirched by being involved in such an embarrassing project and took charge of rectifying and embellishing this fine pet project by using AES-256 as the underlying algorithm.

Now what is AES?

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), originally called Rijndael after its two developers, Belgian cryptographers Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen, is the first and only publicly accessible cipher approved by the US National Security Agency (NSA) for protecting top-secret information. 

Why 256?

To explain what AES-256 is and how it works, let's first discuss encryption. Encryption transforms plaintext into a string of random characters using an encryption key. The chosen ones have a special key (a decryption key) that can decrypt the gibberish into its original state. AES-256 is a symmetric key encryption algorithm which means it uses only one key; that is, the Encryption and the Decryption key are equivalent. AES-256 employs 256 bits for key length, which means it has $2^{256}$(or $1.1\cdot10^{77}$) potential key combinations, making it nearly impossible to crack using brute force methods due to constraints concerning existing computing.

Now, as you all know, this series serves a dual purpose. First, to depress and overburden you with my innermost thoughts and feelings. Second, to depress and overburden you by feeding you fragmented but true information, engineered to manipulate you into believing that you actually learned something. Do you think I fulfilled the second purpose in the last paragraph? ;)

Side note–  All the AES-256 jargon which you read was just paraphrased from this source, because it doesn’t matter how I feed you this information. Humans acting as paraphrasers can’t be called writers anyw-wait there’s another email from the pseudo-stranger.

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Henlo,

I guess you are thinking about the key. Well, a mutual friend of ours once said:

"The explorer empowered Null Set to the power five,

Count the number of factors to reveal the secrets of Phi,

The key shall unlock a door to dismay,

For the future's sake, the past must repay."

Regards,

Pretending to be Anonymous.

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Stop pretending to be anonymous; I know it's you, Psypher.

Credits:

This was the fourth episode of a Sci-fi series I'm writing for Chrysalis, featured in their blog.

Written By: Manav Shah and Amey Danole

Music By: Aaryan Shah

Editor: Vedant Bhutra

Special Thanks: Vivek Nathani