Encryption and hacking drones Options

[Smokeskin]

When people talk about breaking encryption, most of the time they think about breaking public key encryption.

Public key encryption is based on the idea that Alice and Bob meet on the internet and want to share encrypted information. They can then share public keys, do some simple and fast mathematical operations on them, do some more operations, and now they're ready to transmit encrypted data. The clever part here is that they don't have to agree on an encryption code before they "meet" on the internet, enabling encrypted traffic between strangers.

This is because that even though Eve, who wants to spy on them, has picked up the data they transmitted between them to establish an encryption protocol, without Alice's or Bob's chosen private key (a very large prime number) she can't effectively "crack the code". The difficulty of the problem is basically one of factorizing a very large number that is the product of 2 very large primes. This just takes a really, really long time ("standard" professional current encryption takes months on supercomputers and 10,000ths of distributed computers to crack today). Build faster computers for cracking codes you say? The problem is that the complexity increases exponentially for the hacker - if computers get 1,000 times faster, the encrypters increase the complexity by 1,000 and are able to do their operations in the same time, while it now gets 1,000,000 times harder for the hacker so it now takes 1,000 times as long. The hacker just gets further and further behind as technology increases.

There are 2 potential ways to, in the future, hack encryption fast:
1) develop a mathematical method to quickly integer factorize large numbers by conventional means. It has not been proven that this isn't possible, but everyone expects that it can't be done. I wouldn't put my money on this.
2) develop efficient quantum computers. Quantum computers can do some operations that theoretically lets them integer factorize "quickly" and they don't get hit by exponentional complexity as the encrypters increase the size of the prime numbers.

Your average cyberdeck in 2070 obviously has a quantum computing module in there, letting it decrypt intercepted data quickly and easily.

All of this is however based on the premise of public key encryption, which is the only way to do it for communication strangers. People who are not strangers don't use public keys though. They use one time codes. Before you separate, you agree on a list with a number of codes, which are basically just long strings of random numbers you use to encrypt the data. There isn't a mathematical pattern to them, and the hacker doesn't have anything he can number crunch.

This is what a rigger would do with his drones. Back in the shop, he makes a one-time pad with each drone. What a hacker trying to intercept the traffic would hear is "Use code 23113132 [static for 100 milliseconds] Use code 654651651 [static for 100 milliseconds]". This can't be decrypted - there's no pattern, no numbers to crunch, nothing. The drone only accepts encrypted traffic, and the hacker can't spoof and encrypt a message - he doesn't know the encodings, so if he tries to send "Use code 7654435 [command]", the drone decrypts the command and gets static, so it disregards it.

The only ways to hack a drone is
1) hack the cyberdeck of the rigger and get hold of the one-time pads (or got hold off them in some other way, like from his drone shop)
2) if the rigger enables the drone to accept normal communication traffic.

Everything else is just plain unrealistic.
This goes for encrypted comms between professional forces too btw.