Metafire

Ferguson directed Jack and Jill, "Well, let's get back to Sante Fe. Nothing we can do until the data is taken off."

The next Monday, Ferguson got the call from the DEC engineers: "The disk was fully intact. We have it's contents. We think we found Dr. Miller's files. But we have a problem."

"What's the problem?"

"The files appear to be encrypted. And this guy Miller was a cryptologist!"

"I'll be there." Ferguson hung up and drove to Los Alamos. The DEC engineers had reconstructed what appeared to be the whole disk.

"Here. We can even boot an Alpha from the disk copy." They demonstrated. The new disk whirred into action as they clicked the power switch on. The computer screen came to life with strings of text indicating it was successfully booting, and, then, the activity stopped with a familiar log-on prompt.

"But look." They logged on as 'root' and brought up an X-Window to show some mail files in an 'emacs' text editor. " These are encrypted. The same goes for most every user file on the system. There are also a number of different user programs. Some of these are probably encryption programs. There is also source code here. Somebody may be able to reconstruct this guy's environment well enough to decrypt the files. Nobody can remember huge decryption keys. Those things are strings of maybe fifty or a hundred random alphanumeric characters. I would bet this guy's keys are on the disk somewhere. Or maybe they are encrypted with simpler encryptions. We have this guy's personal machine. We got'ta be able to crack it!"