They have the skill but no weapon ready? Imo that's not very unlogical. I have a driving licencse and the driving skill (to speak in game terms), but don't own a car. So does that makes no sense to you?

From the SR4 pre-release FAQ #6:

I don't know if that is still the plan, if it has been rolled into the GM Screen product, if it'll be a Web-freebie, or what. I'm kinda surprised Adam hasn't mentioned it since I seem to remember him being involved with the SR3 Character Dossier and being very happy with the whole idea and execution of it.

You get some freelancers wandering aboot, aye. Welcome.

I'm just happy I was mentioned.

For whatever honour that is.

The Character Dossier, as mentioned, is in this odd limbo-space right now.

Something, new/updated character-sheet wise, will happen, at some point, whether it's the Dossier as I want to do it or something else.

For the first problem, remember something (I believe this is mentioned somewhere in the adventure): This item is not a particularly high priority item for Johnson. He's looking for a lot of things of this nature, and a good majority of them have turned out to be fakes--as he suspects this one probably is. The upshot of all this is that he might not be available for a meet when the characters call him. He might not even be in town. They might get voice mail telling them to leave a message and get back to him. They might get him, saying, "Cool. You got it. I'll be in town in a few days, so we'll meet then." Basically, make it so the characters can be professionals and offer to deliver the disk right away, but Johnson isn't as anxious about it as they are. At that point, they might end up being a bit more curious.

In addition, you could also add in an extra encounter with one of the other groups looking for the disk (or even possibly Nabo's people, pissed at the hacking of the commlink, or Loomis hiring some bozos, if he's still alive).

As for the second problem--it's one of those cases where you have to suspend disbelief a bit. Kind of like how modern-day equipment can't read old floppies. Sort of like how during the Y2K scare, everybody was scrambling to hire 50- and 60-year-old programmers because the modern kids couldn't deal with the old COBOL and FORTRAN systems. Or the Navajo codetalkers. I'm not a computer science expert, but I did get some advice from a couple when I wrote the adventure, and they assured me that, while it wouldn't be easy, it would be possible to come up with an algorithm that would be extremely tough to crack, especially for systems that aren't set up to deal with it.

Don't forget, too: it's not a second-class studio that set that code. It's somebody who was very wealthy and powerful and had access to the best deckers money could buy.

Have the guy selling the disk spill his whole story. Remember, he got it from his Dad but the Mr. J said it was "stolen". Now some "uber-professional" PCs might just say, "Mr. J lied, happens all the time." But others might get a little curious about this significant inconsistency.

There's one code which mathematically provable to be unbreakable, called a one-time pad.

[lecture-mode]
Encryption is, at its simplest level, replacing data with other data that is not itself readable or meaningful, but which can be converted back to the original data through decryption algorithm.

One very simple encryption scheme is to take the binary data, and XOR it with a second binary string. So, for example, the binary representation of the ASCII string "Hello" is;

0100100001100101011011000110110001101111

Lets say we have our key be 11011011. So first, we duplicate the key to equal the length of the string:

1101101111011011110110111101101111011011

And then, we XOR the string against the key:

0100100001100101011011000110110001101111
1101101111011011110110111101101111011011
=
1001101110111110101101111011011110110100

So that would be the encrypted message we send. Then, at the other end, what you do is you take the key, XOR it against the encrypted message, and the original message returns. Sounds great, right?

The problem with this particular algorithm are numerous. Probably the most severe, though, is that - given a long enough message, or enough short messages - you can actually perform a mathematical analysis against the encrypted strings which you can use to derive the key, and then - of course - you can unencrypt the messages. In fact, if the message is significantly longer than the length of the key (such that the key repeats numerous times), you can do it from a single message.

This is where a one-time pad comes in. What you do is you provide a set of pads to both people (or a large number of files, or binders, or whatever). When you send the message, you also send an identification string ("Pad 0154213") that they can use to find the correct key. Once you use a key, you tear the pad off and chuck it. Under two assumptions (a key is NEVER re-used, and the key is at least as long as the message itself), the code is unbreakable.

Why is it unbreakable? Because the characters are indistinct; you can say "Okay, this message is X bites long, so it's X characters", but - with the key at least as long as the message, and the key never re-used - there's no way to tell what string it is. It's equally likely to be ANY string of that length. And in fact, the easy answer to THAT one is to always "round up" - increase the message length with random characters so that you can't analyze the actual length of the message to make a guess at content.

So at that point, the only point of failure are the two ends; if someone can gain access to the pre- or post-encrypted message at either end, or can get a copy of the key used to encrypt it, they get the message... But that's true of ANY encryption scheme, and this one isn't even vulnerable to brute-force decryption attacks like modern public-key encryption is.

The US government has used this technique for a long time. In fact, the way they generate (or at least used to; I don't know if they still do it this way) one-time pads is by having a radiation detector on the roof of a building. It generates a stream of 1s and 0s by measuring the density of cosmic rays hitting it at any given point, which is completely random and thus impossible to replicate somewhere else.

Okay, I'm done.
[/lecture-mode]

Because it's limited to relatively short messages. The longer your message, the more likely that a pattern will emerge, and your encryption can be cracked. You'd have to generate an insanely long string to encrypt even short files; one-time pads are best used for quick messages in shorthand.

And there is an "unbreakable" code in the books. The hash power of fault sprites. Which does lead to the question you're posing-- why hasn't every corporation invested in otaku as heavily as they have in mages? *Especially* with this sort of security availiable?

So register the sprite. No big deal. Corps use bound spirits on patrol all the time. And what you're describing can be as much of an advantage as a disadvantage-- if the file is forcibly taken, the competition can't use it against you. You might not want to do it on every sensitive file, but the really damaging ones are good candidates, and those are the ones shadowrunners would be most interested in. In the meanwhile, you can have the sprite hash/unhash the file as necessary. If it's a mid/low-force sprite, you can easily have it reregistered, and get a massive number of services out of it.

What's more, sprites don't count against the program limits of a node. A sprite can always run away, and let the Black Ice deal with the intruders. You reduce your risk of permanently losing your file, and in the meanwhile, you get unbreakable encryption on it, all for the price of hiring one otaku. Seems like quite a bargain for a security-conscious corp, wouldn't you say?

I am actually thinking of running a campaign about this topic, inspired by the one remark that technomancers aren't common knowledge, yet.

One-time-pad-encryption is not decryptable, that is a proven mathematical fact (i think), under the assumption that you can get really random numbers (and it cannot be proven, that something is really random ).

Actually, that's not true; you're not limited to short messages, you're limited to messages no larger than your key. However, if you have a message larger than your key, you can use more than one key to encrypt it in pieces, and have it reassembled at the far end.

If you want to encrypt a file on a commlink unbreakably, you CAN do this; the problem becomes, where do you store the encryption key? Without said key, it can't be unencrypted. This explains perfectly why the disk is not decryptable; it's an unbreakable cypher whose key they don't have.

You can't use this for network traffic, because every recipient and transmitter to use this would have to have an extensive library of unique keys, known to the other end of the transmission, and used in the correct order at the correct time. This isn't possible.

True, but as Butterblume pointed out, that assumes that your pad was drawn up in a perfectly random method. The longer your key is, the more likely it is that patterns will crop up, allowing your pad to be broken. So, the shorter, the better.

There's no basis for the assumption that cosmic background radiation levels in a particular spot are actually random, rather than pseudo-random. Granted, they're not generated by people, and thus not likely to display human patterns, but natural phenomena generally do have a detectable pattern to them.

If you mean software-based random number generators, then no, they haven't managed to create an RNG that will create an unbreakable code.

Computers have produced "random enough" numbers for things like one-time pads by being hooked up to some sort of theoretically random analog number method, like the aforementioned radiation detector, or Random.org's atmospheric noise system, but there's no mathematical proof that these things are actually random, and that programs 70 years from now won't be able to crack them. It's just that no one's cracked one yet--that we know of.

That's not encryption, that's encoding. And it only works for relatively simple messages. You can send a message that means: "Start overly complicated plan X"; but you can't actually describe what plan X is using this sort of code. You certainly can't send out a set of detailed schematics for the latest tech-toy that way.

Unfortunately, that's way too easy to crack, if you manage to get a hold of the chip/someone who understands l33t. If you get ahold of a one time pad key, it only works for that one message. If you get ahold of a translator for your language tricks, you've lost your entire code. (This was a premise in the movie Windtalkers-- the Navajo was to be killed instead of letting him fall into enemy hands for this very reason.)

In the text at the start of one of the sections, a guy is talking about the reason he became a shadowrunner. Had to do with the corp he and his wife worked for finding out she might have technomancer potential, trying to realize that potential, and horribly killing her in the process, I think.

So, yeah, they're working on it.

Find an Otaku or Technomancer who'd be willing to work for a corp is more likely harder than actually tracking one down...

It would be like asking an atheist to work in the catholic church.

You can make the argument that NOTHING'S random, because - in theory, with enough information on the quantum level - you can predict everything. In actuality, that's not possible; there's no way to measure the quantum interactions of most things. There are a large class of things (radioactive decay and cosmic radiation, for example) that are EXTREMELY predictable over the long term (half-life, and cosmic radiation density, for example) but are - without perfect information on the quantum makeup of the source - completely impossible to predict on the short term... And that's why they're useful.

The cosmic-radiation method DOES show patterns - it tends to generate perfect 50/50 behavior... Over extremely large samples. On small samples, it shows all the normal characteristics of a random distribution with no pattern detectable... Because it's generated by unpredictable natural behavior.

Exactly; this is the beauty of a one-time pad. It's trivial to create a decrypted message, and provably impossible to prove it's the correct message without information that makes decryption pointless.

And even if hyzmarca's argument weren't wrong, it's still based on the un-safe assumption that the underlying message contains words available in the dictionary, formed in a gramatically correct way.

No, this is exactly the wrong thing to do. If you're generating random numbers, you should NEVER profile them like this. Random number streams will regularly have "false patterns"; periods where it appears to be having non-random behavior, but those periods are meaningless over the long term.

By doing what you're suggesting here, you're CREATING a pattern, and opening it up to mathematical analysis based on the pattern your creating. If your source of numbers is sound in the first place, this is significantly worse than useless; and if your source isn't sound, this won't help.