Grrl Power #1035 – Keymaster race
Mele Kalikimaka had been stuck in my head for a week. I apologize if I earwormed anyone else.
In reality, anything involving four possible entries would never give you good security options. (Because there’s only four nucleotides found in DNA?) Eight character passwords using only lower case letters can be cracked so quickly today that the time involved is basically negligible, and Deus is talking about something that works out to 64^3 there at the end, which is only 262,144. If each entry can only be G, A, T, or C, then multiply 262,144 by 256, and you get just over 67 million possibilities. A modern computer can rip through that pretty quickly.
However, we’re not talking about straight up computational encryption busting. As Dabbler guessed on the previous page, the superion field only reacts to sapience. Having a print out of every combination doesn’t do you any good, you have to implement it in something with DNA in just the right sequence. Unless you’re a geneticists with just heaps of discards, you’re not going to just stumble across this, especially if you’re just genetically engineering fruit flies or something else without sapience. Even then, human superpowers don’t show up right away. It mostly happens around 8-12 and they take a while to develop.
Edit: As usual, I’ve outsmarted myself and fucked up the math. Deus is proposing a structure that is 64 rings, each comprised of 64 possible entries, each of those entries has 64 levels. Sort of a 4D tumbler, where each “number in the combination” is actually like one of those gym locker locks with 4 rotors, but instead of having 10 numbers, it just has the 4 nucleotides from human DNA. 4 rotors times 4 repeatable entries is 4x4x4x4, right? 4^4 = 256. 64 rings of 64 positions of 64 stacks, or 64^3 = 262,144 possible configurations. Then I just multiplied 256 by 262,144 for ~67 million and change.
BUT, while the above math itself is correct, the “word problem” I used to formulate it isn’t. The problem isn’t 4^4 x 64^3. That would work if we’re talking about turning a dial on a safe where there’s only one right answer per dial. The way I framed it in the comic, ALL 64 entries of 256 possible combinations on ALL of the 64 stacks of 64 disks have to be correct. I can’t even figure out the formula for that, but there’s been more than one suggestion that it’s 4^(64^3). According to the Windows calculator, the result of that figure is “FUCK OFF.” It’s probably one of those “more than the number of atoms in the universe” numbers.
So when Dabbler says “a pretty solid encryption key,” it might be an understatement. Honestly I might have to revise Deus’s figures just a bit, cause that seems a little extreme.
This is all assuming he’s telling the truth, though. :D
I keep forgetting to promote this: The kickstarter for Tamer 8 is up! It has already comfortably made its goal, I think it did that in the first few hours, but I’m letting you know so you can get the book and extra goodies if’n you want as soon as everything is available.
New incentive is up! Dabbler decided to get out of the pool, in slow motion (see the bonus comic at Patreon), possibly with added “physics.”
Cue Mele Kalikimaka.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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the funniest part is where Deus crashes ms scientists brain.
. …You know, guys if GOD encrypted the fundamental quantum field, maybe we should back off a bit and think this over.
ROTFLMAO! Humans? Those over evolved under developed feces flingers back off because it might hurt or worse? That’s the funniest dang joke ever. LET THE WAAAAAGH! Begin! Let the spineless be cast back. (toddles off to tape a plasma lance to a cleaning bot)
Drive me closer! I want to hit them with my sword!
Why? Let the experiments commence!
*cackles wildly and retrieves poking stick*
FOR SCIENCE!
Charge up the NERVE WEASELS!
Those… those are painless, right?
I assure you, they won’t feel a thing.
Oh my, no.
somewhere a Nth admin is like, “sure are a lot of new power authorization codes unlocking on that planet, must be a pretty popular game arena.”
Pixel seeing all that from the Orbs could actually explain Why humanity. If the orbs work by accessing the Superion field using this same soty of decryption key, then they could have “irradiated” earthling DNA with the code and humans are simply the one species here with the sapience enough to utilise it. Superhero parrots, corvids, octopuses, and elephants would sure as hell be something though.
You forgot the Supervillain Gorillas.
Primates do have some genetic commonalities. If human DNA unlocks powers, other primates ought to be the most likely candidates to do so as well. Guess Dexter had already cracked the code with Monkey, and it explains a lot about Mojo Jojo too.
Me, I’m looking forward to the first Super-Lemurs. :)
Sup.
> Primates do have some genetic commonalities.
Bananas do have some genetic commonalities.
A lot of Human genetic code is essentially common to all life on Earth. It’s like a series of nested customisation options: “this is how you build protoplasmic life-as-we-know it … this is how you make it multicellular … this is how you customise it to a mammal … to a primate … to a Human … to Joe Bloggs from Derby”. Of course, the signal-to-noise ratio isn’t great, because biology prefers to put the effort into error correction rather than error prevention: Joe Bloggs from Derby may not share a single allele with Jenny Pitts from Omaha, even though they’re both recognisably Humans of North European ancestry.
So what you’re saying is, let’s hope bananas have not yet gained sapience in a way as of yet unknown to us. They could have weird powers. And let’s pray they do not gain it in close proximity to people’s faces.
Is this the pitch for to the next crossover visitor?
The whales flying with water controlling powers angry about whaling.
The Land shark film…
Now I can’t help imagining an elephant with super translation, or a crocodile with super healing (others).
I’m sure they would find that very useful.
Maybe a coala with super digestion, still never trying anything else than eucalyptus?
They could become pet animals for the “league of super redundant heroes”.
Krona.
maybe DaveB should have named the computer themed reality hacker something cyber like Pixel, and not given that name to a pink werejaguar with laser claws, seems to cause regular confusion in the comments.
I figured it was a deliberate subversion of the comic trend of naming people after their powers, because Dave’s ranted about it at least twice.
Here’s a 3rd, with a character I’d love to see come back because she and Halo have the most awesome exchanges.
yes. Though I’m sure I’d be able to remember Krona’s name better if there wasn’t also a different character named Pixel.
For love of [Insert name of supreme intelligence here], keep Sydney away from this!
https://www.physics-astronomy.com/2022/03/scientists-discover-self-destruct.html?fbclid=IwAR0kPOK08YeA9-P2gLiZskOW91B25B2MZ0XRb_bW-axDEcdkQmfm2L3S9Ps
Wow it looks like Deus this has broken dabbler. And now you just have to find out whether or not he’s actually right. Think of it Angels demons and now Worcester the encryption key
Dabbler’s horrified expression at the implications is truly a thing of beauty ^_^
So the reasons supers exists is that their dna happens to decrypt “the fundamental quantum field”, or whatever we now call probabilities in quantum field theory become suddenly determined.
I’m with Dabbler.
Someone encrypted the godsdamn universe and then seeded humans as the encryption key?
Holy wars have started over less…
Actually only super humans, not humans.
Super have the universe decryption key encoded in their DNA.
That explains how they can actually defy the rule of said universe
Deep Thought.
64 base is so obviously wrong!
Yeah, but 32 was just a…Bit….underpowered
I see you’ve decided to double down on that 1 joke.
…and then there’s Varia.
Who it seems is a living master key, or a skeleton key, AND it works on regular humans.
This would also imply most regular humans have at least some limited supra-genes or a limited potential powerset, if not the full ‘activate me’ mode, given she can take a different and concistent set from anyone and everyone.
So not only did someone encrypt the universe; they put a backdoor in too…
now the question is, why Earth? as previously mentioned, “humans” have being exported across the entire galaxy one way or another
but! only on Earth do the Humans unlock unique superpowers, when was the decryption added to humankind? before or after being spread on the universe? do humans outside in the galaxy also possess the decryption potential?
does Varia’s power works on aliens? so many questions
as for Sydney, when Varia touched her, it seemed like they shared the control of the orbs, is Sydney’s power a sort of genetic master key that allow her to use specie restricted items? that would explain why she is the first one to get bound to the orbs while many people probably dived there before
but then, if Sydney does have an awakened superpower, why doesn’t she have a supermodel body like every other super? so many questions
It’s looking like somebody, (Nth wizards?) literally hacked the laws of physics, and inserted one or more new physical laws, that you could only access if you had the authorization code.
Seriously, if you could do something like that, you likely wouldn’t stop at one new physical law.
So, back to my theory: Earth is where the Nth hang out doing RPGs: Reincarnating as superhumans with their Nth memories suppressed for the duration. The player characters get the superion field authorization code stuck in their DNA, the rest of us are just NPCs.
Humans elsewhere typically don’t have it, because they’re off the game board.
If this is the big reveal then DaveB has sat on it longer than most series that have the *higher beings influenced some fundamental aspect of this setting *usually magic or an esper field*, in the few series I know of that have a take away like this you get one of these beings interacting with the protagonist at some point *Admin voice in their head, one of their friends is really one of these watching or interacting up close, they themselves are but had their memories and greater extent of power suppressed.
Funny thought, if Earth is an RPG, then its an RPG generating zone in a wider open interactive cross-genre environment so elements from Earth can spread elsewhere and elements from elsewhere come to Earth.
there is also the experimental factor, as Earth seems to have the most supernatural genetic modifications which may be earlier projects.
that said, pointed out before Sidney’s orbs feel like toys…but what if they aren’t the same game, same with Maxima, both have alien sources of power, so whatever trick is unlocking superpowers for them could be some “hackers” bringing their favorite toys from elsewhere and throwing them into the mix to see what happens.
Wait this theory actually makes a lot of sense when you realize DaveB based a lot of the supers in this series off of an existing real life tabletop RPG game and that RPG game’s mechanics.
If the Supers were already inspired by an RPG game’s mechanics, then why couldn’t they actually have that be true in-universe?
the very first few pages were a clue, and we never saw it coming.
My long-term theory has been that one of the orb unlocks will give her a superhuman physique.
At a dramatically, or comedically, important point of the story, of course.
to paraphrase a few cosmic beings, ascended, eldritch and so on.
*We did not come to your world because it is special, it is special because we came here.
Varia is using regular DNA as a ‘Seed’ in a hash table.
How long has he been in charge again?
Didn’t you say it requires sentience and not sapience on the last page?
Sssshhhhhh!
Yes, actually Dabbler said interacting with the thaumion field requires sentience. I might have gotten ahead of myself a little there. :)
So basically, super powers are genetic, but in an extremely complicated way that is basically impossible to figure out via sequencing genomes.
The question is, why is it this way? Random chance, or a higher power. And why does humanity hold the key? Same options.
It doesn’t have to be either random chance or a higher power, it could be random-assed beings screwing around with powers beyond their comprehension.
There’s one rule I hold to: Something in the universe has a demented sense of humor.
Hidden superpower capability that only shows up in a specific species in the correct environment? Totally in line with said demented sense of humor.
(Whether it’s a “god” or a “force” or something that appeared or wandered in sometime later is up in the air. As is whether it has phenomenal cosmic powers or just the ability to nudge things in a certain, funny to it, direction.)
As a dungeon master, I freely admit that I identify with this description.
Probably have something to do with the orb being nearby
OK I have absolutely no idea what this is about or where it is going.
Easy, he’s slowly setting up the stage for future events.
That’s usually what exposition is about which is what’s happening here.
Also works as world building and sets in stone certain rules and logic in the barrackverse.
a part of the basic fundamental things that exists in the universe is for some reason encrypted
the questions now are “has it always been encrypted?” “if not who encrypted it and why?”
And how do I test this statement?
think that’s just a given in pretty much any science question… maybe with the word “safely” before “test” though
Probably the biggest takeaway is that one of the most fundamental forces in the universe is encrypted. “Encryption” generally implies that someone out there was deliberately trying to prevent others from discovering it. Anyone that would have the ability to do such a thing would pretty much be godlike in nature. There was someone or multiple someones with the knowledge and ability to affect.
It’s like saying that there’s someone out there who took a look at the universe and said, “You know what would make this thing more interesting? Gravity. It’s pretty boring right now, I bet some gravity would spice it right up.” And then they go ahead and add gravity to the universe.
Someone with that level of power.
The comic has already hinted at these “Nth level beings”, folks with technology and/or capability that puts their science at a level where it’s thoroughly indistinguishable from magic, even to the most scientifically advanced civilizations currently existing. It’s highly likely that they have a hand in this.
It was also hinted that there are unsavory types who would do basically anything to get their hands on artifacts left by these Nth level beings, and that Halo’s orbs might be such technology. Now it appears that the entire human race (or, at least, the superhumans among them) might ALSO be such technology, living keys able to access this encrypted fundamental force.
It’s pretty likely that that’s a clue as to where this is going. The universe is gonna be very, very interested in humans and superhumans, if Deus’s theories prove viable.
I concur, now the question is how powerful are they?
the Kardeshev scale does a massive leap from galaxy to universe going from 3 to 4 tier *blame the lack of comprehension of scale on that* which is why some stretch this scale up to 7, myself to 10 by changing a number of criteria.
the point being are we looking at just above ascended beings with mastery over one galaxy, a set of galaxies, or no need; are they higher dimension beings, a Star Ocean scenario where they really aren’t that different but come from outside the universe as programmers, or are incomprehensible trans universal beings that saw the universe as something to change and rearrange and make games out of, not unlike molding and coding *you saw the blips and blops of electrical signals and over time invented Skyrim and Super Mario…they did that too, just on a cosmic scale and directly to the laws of physics.
What is Maxima holding? It’s been bugging me.
It appears to be a box-cutter.
No, I lied. It seems to be a forgotten candy-bar.
Definitely a candy bar.
Protein bar.
Has the company hired her for their spokesperson yet?
I can see the commercial: “Introducing the new ‘MAXX’ protein bar!”
(packaged in a gold foil wrapper obviously)
With four possible values per character in a 262,144 character key, the possible keycount should be 4^262,144, not 256*262,144.
To think of it another way, a 262,144 but encryption key would be considered pretty damn strong, and that’s only with two ‘letters’ in the mix
The number of possibilities, when fully written down, would require 158 thousand digits. Nothing we currently have has any hope to even come close to cracking such an encryption before the Sun goes out.
Yeah, I’ve been trying to figure out how you get 256 times anything out of this – 256 is the number of possible 4-base “words” you can make, but if you’re using those words as the fundamental units of the rings of rings that would give 256^262,144 possibilities, or 4^1,048,576 or 2^2,097,152 – a number with more than 630,000 digits when written out.
Or, put another way, if you could use any standard ASCII characters in a password, you’d be looking at requiring around 300,000 characters to get a password of the same strength.
The comic doesn’t have enough detail to even being to start the computation–which is as it should be.
The issue isn’t the size of the keyspace–it is that there is encryption present _at all_. If you Dabbler’s mind. blown. reaction is _exactly_ right if you know a bit of physics.
Think about the proverbial needle in a haystack. The issue isn’t finding the needle. It realizing that something like a needle might even be in that haystack in the first place.
Only in this case, needle’s fundamental nature is such that it’s presence in the haystack requires something be deeply changed about what we understand about the universe. It’s more like finding a black hole in a haystack.
It’s probably worse.
Which needle, exactly? I mean, if there’s one needle found, how many others are there????????
Deus did just hand Dabbler the keys to the super kingdom. Well, told her how to make the keys. And she’s surrounded by working samples. I wonder who’s going to kick themselves, now that it’s become soooooo obvious.
dot-exe files encountering logic errors can truck on for a long time. Sensible operating systems just shoot the process and be done with it. Dump core for the programmer to sort out. dot-exes, er, the system has some sort of Markov chain thing that in my experience does nothing but sit there and deny me the opportunity to shoot the process. It’s just more clicks to get that out of the way as well as the non-responding process, not more useful. Even worse if that logic is applied to the OS itself failing to boot. I actually tried doing a MOOC that explained the internal workings of such things, and gave that vendor’s implementations as shining examples. Having seen those, I don’t regret not keeping up with that class. It was hella hard and if that’s the end result, it’s not worth it.
Dabbler has two belly buttons. One of them must be her reset switch.
Okay. High hopes, low expectations, but this could be the start of something actually really cool.
4 entries 64^3 times is 4^(64^3) possibilities, a *lot* more than 67 million. 64 kibioctets (“kilobytes” in common parlance) of data, actually, rather than the 26 bits that 67M take.
It’s baffling how so many companies still think demanding passwords have special characters, numbers and whatnot would make them safer. It’s all the same to the PC, and having them in the pool of acceptable characters is definitely good, so limiting the pool for any number of characters decreases the overall number of possible passwords.
Not that there’s much to stop brute forcing a password when repeatedly attempting a login with a wrong password have no consequences.
The strangest thing I’ve encountered was a game where I couldn’t log in after creating my account. Turns out my password was longer than what they allowed for (and the password field on the login screen didn’t cut off after 12 digits or so, like the one to set the password).
Any company with IT security worth a dime has it set up to detect brute force attacks and flag the account after 3-4 failed attempts. With millions and millions of possibilities brute forcing only works on companies that are very small or run by idiots. What complex passwords that change frequently do open up though is that humans struggle to remember them, so they are usually written down at the desk, often under the keyboard, so if you gain physical access, getting computer access is just searching cubicles until you find someone’s written password.
And I am still bored by this whole Deus in Africa arc…. I really think the comic has jumped the shark
Obligatory XKCD – https://xkcd.com/936/
The scariest part of any security at all is… there is ALWAYS an employee who
* needs money
* is pissed off
It’s been shown time and again that bribery and corruption are — respectively — the best and close second methods of initial penetration. I’m not even going to bother about listing the high-profile victims. It is reasonable to accept their IT security was probably up to scratch. So how did they go down?
You know things are going down when that happens to Dabbler of all things! o.o
That’s a hell of a lot of keyspace. It’ll take more than the age of the universe to find the right one. Having *one* key is nothing because it’s almost certainly useless for what you want to decrypt.
But it would definitely help if you had access to a lot of samples. And a fast, accurate pattern matching algorithm.
I repeat something I said a long time ago- I think Deus has boner powers that let him fully identify everything about whoever he was with.
So… Did Deus do this work himself? He seems more of the ‘I have people to do that for me’ type, but you never know.
Why is Deus giving this information to everyone else?
That’s the beauty of public-key crypto. You can write your public key on a bathroom wall but without the private key it’s useless.
If only Maxima had said “As One Does” to truly personify the meme. Nerd-girls never reform. They just respawn.
Im sure Deus has a reason to be explaining this. If we know anything about Deus, praise be his name, it is that he always does things for a reason and he is on step 476 while others are trying to figure out step 3.
egotism and he was asked. How often do you get to flaunt a cosmic discovery to an alien demon sorceress mad scientist that they never even realized existed?
Also just because you have the theorem doesn’t mean you have the means to apply it. if Deus does is another matter.
So, does this now confirm supers are artificial? I’m usually pretty astute but I’m stumped right now
It’s a bit more fundamental than that. If a fundamental force of the multiverse is encrypted, that implies that the laws of physics are artificial, and the entire multiverse is some sort of artificially-created construct.
Super DNA is the Easter egg in the Matrix.
Eh, not necessarily. There are some notions of physical law where everything is just logical relationships without any underlying hardware, and you might be able to add to the naturally evolved “script” in a way that would look like a pre-existing physical law to anybody who hadn’t worked their way all the way to the bottom.
The challenge is that the existing laws are the result of a kind of evolutionary competition between competing potential rule sets, and you’d have to be pretty darned smart to come up with a new rule that wouldn’t get eaten alive by the existing rules.
A lot you are saying the sorts of things I would normally say, so I am at a loss on what to add LoL.
But yeah, this makes sense. If you have something that has a way to directly interact with and alter the quantum field of the universe, either as a higher dimension being or something from an extra universe source with properties just that alien to the known laws of physics *super eldritch ascended deluxe beings…space wizards*, then it could be like a game, like building ontop of and into an existing framework and the trick being to see how much you can add and how different before the whole thing starts to fall apart, break down, or contradicts so you get a feed back error/cancels out.
-we thought it would be funny if we tweeked gravity one day in such a way that it acts like a force in every way but one, not fundamentally changing its function but making it rule breaking enough to be frustrating to anything that doesn’t know physics can be hacked. Or gravity only exists as it does in this universe because some higher beings wanted their yard to be bouncy for their babies to play on and wave distortions of the space/time was the easiest way to go about it.
God dammit. I’m intrigued.
I think your math is off a bit there, Dave. The base is the number of possible choices. For binary it’d be 2, for letters (only one case) it’d be 26, etc. So There are 4 choices, 64 slots per ring so 4^64 permutations per ring. Each of the metarings has 4^64 possible permutations per slot, and 64 slots, so each metaring has 4^64^64 permutations. Finally, each ubermetaring has 4^64^64 permutations per slot, and 64 slots, so 4^64^64^64 permutations.
The metarings already max out my calculator at about 10^2466 permutations, so using algebra to approximate, we get 10^10^217 total permutations.
That’s pretty hardcore.
Yeah, to put it in perspective, bitcoin private keys are 256 bits long, so you could represent one using only 128 DNA base pairs (each base can stand for two bits since there are four of them). And this length was chosen to be ‘future-proof’: longer than anything we’d expect computers could effectively bash through not just today but for the (foreseeable) future.
And you just went *way* beyond 128 base pairs.
I read the first sentence of your comment and am just going to pop down here and agree. I don’t think I’ve ever put math in the comic or my comments that were remotely accurate.
Fun fact: since there are 4^(64^3) possibilities (I have an applied math degree and that seems like the correct number) and somewhere between 10^78 and 10^82 atoms in the observable universe, we get that there are as many possibilities as atoms in 1923 to 2024 observable universes.
–Long-time reader, first time commenter…but can’t resist math
I like how this means there is heroic diversity; most are powered by the Superion Field, but there will also be mages and psions and aliens – and presumably regular-boring-technology-enhanced or just-trains-a-lot heroes.
Hoo boy, I sure could not follow your math in the description but I have graded enough university-level-math to tell it does have the hallmarks of the writer having screwed it up to the point where anyone who has understood the stuff needs to put in mental overtime to unravel where it went wrong.
First off, the claim that anything with only four characters could never be secure is utter nonsense. Computers generally work with two of them and it is an easy exercise that these are enough to emulate any system with finitely many characters. So, unless you want to reject the possibility of computational encryption altogether, that’s not gonna work out.
Second, I agree that in Deus’ structure there seem to be 64^3 = 2^18 = 262144 positions, but I haven no idea whatsoever where you pull that 256 from or why you think these two numbers would need to be multiplied.
The simplest model with four characters and 2^18 positions assumes that any character can appear at any positions and each position can be uniquely identified such that any two codes which differ in any one of the positions cannot be substituted for each other. This way we would end up with 4^(2^18) = 256^(2^16) which is the amount of data in 64kiB (65536 Bytes), so not a huge file but assuming you can draw the uniformly at random an insane length for a cryptographic key in modern human usages. As a comparison, the usual recommendation for an RSA-key are 2^11 bits or 8 bytes. [1]
[to be continued, the editor here is annoying]
[1]: Difference between entropy and file size will be hinted at in the continuation.
sounds more like supers super powers manifest due to the Super Dna matching that version or due to Super dna matched close to say the universe creation code flight. so sense the DNA encription or decryption key synched close enough they manifested flight powers. while if some one some how got the correct DNA decryption could go full on god mode or creative mode minecraft style and or Ben 10 any power
Huh. Maybe that explains Big D himself?
Dabbler is so confused/broken now.
And there’s a horrible part: There are so many bits of information she CANNOT give anyone from Earth. Stuff that would probably help identify this previously unknown quantum field branch. And possibly others.
So she’ll have to be very careful in how she researches it. Not to mention that she might not be allowed access to all the data already created. I mean, already she’s got a big chunk of it.
It’s also possible that the orbs use a different, encoded field, since they’re still a mystery. Because if it was the same, then it would also imply it was somehow lost. Which has all kinds of implications. (And hey, maybe Sydney getting all this information might be enough to figure out something else about them. Knowledge based level up. If not a point, then a ‘this is what this random already assigned point actually does’.)
“If each entry can only be G, A, T, or C, then multiply 262,144 by 256, and you get just over 67 million possibilities. ”
That’s not how it works. If you have a key length of 262,144 (e.g. 64^3), and each ‘digit’ can be one of four values, then your keyspace is 4 ^ 262,144. This is an impossibly long key that can’t be brute forced.
Consider this – your passwords and crypto keys aren’t stored as “Abc123@!2022”. They are instead turned into 0s and 1s and all the cryptographic functions work on those 0s and 1s. And yet, passwords and keys are fine.
Here’s the certificate of http://www.grrlpowercomic.com:
—–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–
MIIFRjCCBC6gAwIBAgISAwOqCXBmnArXo6nlqCclg5MVMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBCwUA
MDIxCzAJBgNVBAYTAlVTMRYwFAYDVQQKEw1MZXQncyBFbmNyeXB0MQswCQYDVQQD
…
…
—–END CERTIFICATE—–
You’ll notice that this is only using a-z, A-Z, 0-1 as its “entries”. And each of those entries map easily to 0s and 1s. But it’s perfectly fine, because http://www.grrlpowercomic.com‘s key is 2048 bits long. The guessing required to find the matching private key is not feasible.
This is the whole point of public keys – you publish half of a very complex friendship bracelet, and only having the other half can make it mean anything. Just like you could drop copies of the key to your front door anywhere as long as you didn’t also drop your address with them. And even then, certs only mean anything in a specific context – you couldn’t access the back end of this site with the private key in your browser.
So thats why roaches are so hard to kill! Instant regen!
Now, in your world, not all combinations might be usable (roughly how RSA-key-files are larger than 8 Bytes even when following the recommendation) and maybe the symmetries of the (ℤ/64ℤ)^3 make some of them equivalent, but by a rather coarse rule of thumb, reducing exponential combinatorics to multiplicative is next to impossible. The number you gave would not correspond to having an nucleobase at each position but to having four of them in a single position and leaving all other positions empty. This would be the equivalent of having a super long password but making public the information that only on single character in you password is not the ASCII space character. This fairly soundly defeats the major purpose of a long password.
To circle back to your initial example of eight character password using only lower case characters. Yes, those may be rather insecure once I can get a computer to try them out on its own time, something which is surprisingly easy and hence should always be assumed when choosing a password, but the important part to switch up is the “eight characters”, not the “lower case characters”. Increasing this to only length ten lower-case gains more possibilities than going to lenght eight mixed-case! A randomly generated lower-case password of one thousand characters corresponds to a randomly generated genome of between 2000 and 2500 nucleobases. If I got each of the 10^80 atoms in the universe to test out one of these combinations each planck time, the duration of going through them all would still outstrip the age of the universe by a sheer unimaginable factor. And 2500 nucleobases are way, *way* less than what Deus appears to be proposing as the number of relevant ones. Noone is gonna check them all out anytime soon.
Of course, this means that there are various combinations / keys, which unlock some part of the superion field, and going through enough of them to get reliable access to significant proportions to (possibly all of) the superion field might be a whole lot easier. In fact, it has to be, for humanity to have stumbled upon it.
Check out the background music for a certain 1980s cartoon series and maybe play the appropriate one for any of the archived comics….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFqryP8E1BY&list=PLds-skkkX3bSW2cXNnhkssDF_847GsL_m&index=2&t=1469s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFnROBbrez8&list=PLds-skkkX3bSW2cXNnhkssDF_847GsL_m&index=3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4OD1HV66To&list=PLds-skkkX3bSW2cXNnhkssDF_847GsL_m&index=4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaMJqITiShY&list=PLds-skkkX3bSW2cXNnhkssDF_847GsL_m&index=1
Binary only has two options and it gives you perfectly fine encryption. Keep in mind that all the “letters” you type are just long strings of binary numbers. The number of options per “bit” doesn’t make any difference at all to encryption.
just one super borne with the 3d0g* power and whoops there goes the universe.
*Apple II reset code and a Voice in the Capital Wasteland.
So if we “it’s aliens” to blow the minds of our fellow humans… we need to “it’s encrypted” to blow the mind of an alien?
Checks out.
Gonna be honest the math bits ate pretty much just nod a long for me. I’m a little too distracted by Lab Coat variant Dabbler… I humbly suggest that you consider that for a vote incentive.
All in favor?
Time to find the Queen Administrator. She might be needed here.
It’s best to leave khepri alone and dreaming.
And NOW we see the depths of Deus’s villainy. He doesn’t need superpowers because he can TAKE THEM AWAY from others…
This is why we can’t have nice things. Unlocking the ability to flip the superpower switch in anyone’s DNA is going to create an insane galaxy-wide arms race.*
* Dabbler clearly has a head start here, in both senses.
So…. A quantum field that’s encrypted in such a way that the encrypted form works as nasically the same field *without* the Extra Features.
Pretty nifty.
Your commentary is conflating human/succubus-readable key representations with data storage representation.
As pointed out by Herman Doppes and Shaun, we already have a system to write encryption/decryption keys with only two possible characters. The thing is, those are the exact same keys that are written as letters, numbers and symbols in an RSA key, or the 8 lowercase letters in the archetypal useless password. Changing to a system of 1s and 0s is only a translation, which retains all of the meaning of the original representation.
It’s entirely possible that the genetic encoding is a bad password, produced in a language where a huge number of 4-option symbols (I can’t find the right word, so I’m just going to call them 4its) represent a single character. A computer scientist who has memorized the 4it-ASCII tables could actually do a party trick where they put spaces in the right spots, then translate the message by hand. It even gets easier if someone used an actual word, because at a certain point the game becomes Wheel of Fortune.
In the party-trick scenario, the key is awful, but not because it was written in 4its. It’s awful because some moron decided to use a recognizable word or saying from their language as a password, instead of generating a random series of 4its. That allows the people trying to guess the key to simply skip the heavy, brute-force computation of guessing a long key (measured in number of 4its), and simply crack open a dictionary. (guessing all ~48000 words in the english language takes fewer attempts than trying every possible combination of only 8 4its: 4^8 = 65536)
Panel 1: If this is a projection from a projector, as you can see the light coming from behind our two “students”, the image of the cyclical code should be layered on top of his hand. As it is now, it seems like he sits in front of a screen … which he just wrote on with a whiteboard pen.
It depends on how far away from the screen he is – if he’s right in front of it, he should cast a shadow and have his hand lit up, but, looking at the angle the light is passing Dabbler in panel 4, he doesn’t need to be all that far from the screen to be out of the beam from the overhead projector.
“Maxima, I think I broke your sidekick.”
and the lord said unto humanity, gaze upon my porn stash and grow strong