Professor Kim Jiyun was in a hurry.
Click, clack.
The sound of her heels in the corridor was a beat faster than usual. She had been to this building many times, but never had her heart pounded like it did today.
It had been three days since she requested a meeting with the minister. When the secretary asked what it was about, she answered briefly.
“It concerns the future of the nation.”
The secretary had laughed as if to say not to joke around, but she could not laugh with him. Unfortunately, it was not an exaggeration in the slightest.
Creak—
The door opened.
Minister of Science and ICT Lee Hyeonseok rose from the sofa and held out his hand. He had the face of a bureaucrat in his mid-fifties. A gentle man, yet one whose entire body made it clear that he was busy.
“Professor, it’s been a while. Please, have a seat.”
As soon as Jiyun sat down, she took a tablet out of her bag.
“I know you’re busy, so I’ll get straight to the point.”
“Please do.”
She showed the minister the New York Times articles she had prepared.
[Nasdaq Soars on Cybersecurity and Quantum-Resistant Cryptography Stocks. Banking Sector Announces Full Replacement of Security Infrastructure]
[U.S. Government: “Transition to Quantum-Resistant Cryptography Will Be a Top National Priority.”]
“I’ve received the briefing as well. But is this truly urgent enough for you to request a private meeting with the Minister of Science and ICT right away?”
Jiyun thumped her chest in frustration.
“We must prepare, at the national level, for a war over cryptographic standards. Immediately.”
The minister narrowed his brow as he looked at her.
“Quantum-resistant cryptography. Are you referring to PQC? That has already been standardized by NIST, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology—”
“No!”
Jiyun cut him off.
“I apologize. But we don’t have time. The NIST standards are not perfect. They were completed before Seoha’s theory emerged. That means they, too, will have to start over from zero.”
She took documents from an envelope and spread them out. They were packed with equations and diagrams.
As a cryptographer, Jiyun had attended conferences held all over the world. The conclusion she had reached there was singular: no organization or nation in the world possessed a clear blueprint for next-generation PQC. And at the time, everyone had considered that only natural. The transition of standards was thought to be a future that would come only decades later.
“RSA encryption has received a death sentence. Seoha finished it off. The modern cryptographic system will die. And in the not-so-distant future. This is a fixed future.”
The minister’s eyes widened. Then he burst into loud laughter.
“Hahaha! That’s far too much of an exaggeration. I’ve received reports too. They said Seoha’s paper would advance cryptanalysis technology somewhat, but that it wasn’t an immediate danger.”
She sighed and shook her head.
“I don’t know which working-level official submitted that report, but I can say this with certainty: he is not a mathematician.”
At her icy voice, the minister’s laughter gradually stopped.
“The report probably said something like this, didn’t it? ‘Even if the Riemann Hypothesis has been solved, it does not mean cryptographic systems will collapse in the near future.’”
Gulp.
The minister nodded.
“By the standards of the past, that may be true. But the geometric space and Hamiltonian operator Seoha created are different.”
Jiyun pointed to a page among the documents on the table, one covered in complex equations.
“This operator reads the waves of prime numbers. In other words, it can dramatically reduce the spectrum of the zero distribution. The supercomputer at Germany’s LRZ has already proven the power it possesses.
How long would it take to optimize this equation into a decryption algorithm? Ten years at most. If the geniuses of the world set their minds to it and rush in, it could be far shorter than that.”
“T-then…”
“Literally speaking, RSA is already dead. Every national system in the world today is standing on top of a corpse.”
The minister’s face turned pale.
“Are you saying that 2048-bit encryption, which was supposed to take hundreds of millions of years to crack, could be broken? Even before quantum computers are completed?”
Jiyun smiled and drove in the final nail.
“Right now, NSA headquarters is probably a house of mourning. Their most sensitive military networks could be hacked. They won’t be in a position to be picky. They may even try to drag in PQC, still in its infancy, and patch things up with it immediately. Even if they have to pour in thousands of trillions of won.”
The minister swallowed hard and leaned forward.
“What is your true purpose in coming to me, Professor? I doubt you came simply to give me a warning.”
Jiyun’s eyes gleamed sharply.
“This is an opportunity to escape subordination.”
“Subordination?”
“Until now, the Republic of Korea—no, every nation except the United States—has had to use the standards set by NIST. National defense, finance, telecommunications—there was no exception. Even so, it was bearable in its own way.”
“Hmm.”
The minister nodded.
“RSA was free.”
“That’s right. RSA’s core patents expired in the early 2000s. The original patents held by MIT passed into the public domain. It was a good cryptographic system. Prime factorization is mathematically simple, so it was easy to implement even on older CPUs.”
“So that’s why everything from smartphones to public certificates used RSA.”
“But PQC is different.”
She swiped the tablet screen.
“Lattice-based cryptography, code-based cryptography, multivariate cryptography. The leading PQC candidates today differ from RSA in their mathematical structures themselves. Their operations are incomparably more complex. To implement the same level of security, they may require hundreds of times more resources. Which means—”
She raised her index finger.
“It will require dedicated hardware chips. Every device in the world that needs encryption. How large do you think that market will be?”
Jiyun continued.
“And that isn’t all. Once someone holds the standard, products must be made on the basis of that design, so it becomes impossible to avoid patents. This is on an entirely different level from RSA being free. For the next several decades—perhaps even more than a century!”
She looked the minister straight in the eye and said,
“The entire world will be structured to pay technology fees to the nation that holds the standard.”
The minister rose from his seat and walked to the window.
In the span of ten minutes, his face seemed to have aged years.
“At present, the United States would be the most likely candidate, I suppose?”
“They’re the country that has spent the most money on PQC.”
“Then we’ll have to bow and scrape and line up again. It’s not as though we can create PQC overnight. What is the situation in other countries?”
Jiyun showed him the materials.
“The EU is already pouring an enormous budget into research on its own independent standard. China hasn’t made anything public, but I hear they’ve been calling back their cryptography experts who were staying overseas, one after another.”
The minister slowly turned around.
“Then what exactly are you suggesting? There’s no way we can secure a budget on the level of the U.S., China, or the EU!”
Before answering, Jiyun took a brief breath.
She had prepared for three days to say this one sentence.
“Minister, the Republic of Korea possesses the most important element needed to win this fight.”
“We have something like that?”
“Because we are a country that possesses Yu Seoha.
Seoha destroyed RSA all by himself. In cryptography, the sharpest spear is also the strongest shield. Because attack and defense share the same mathematical foundation.”
“W-wait! Seoha is affiliated with MIT, isn’t he? Is there no chance he might develop cryptography for the United States?”
“There is more than enough chance. That is why I asked to meet you so urgently.”
“No, then it isn’t as though there’s no way!”
The minister placed a hand on his chin and began pacing around the room in agitation. Just as he seemed to have made up his mind and was about to speak, Jiyun raised a hand to stop him.
“Don’t tell me you’re thinking of putting Seoha in a defense contractor and exploiting him through alternative military service.”
The minister looked startled.
Jiyun knew very well how the nation treated scientists. Talents who had not yet completed military service were especially easy targets for the state to handle.
“If you approach Seoha in that manner, we will lose even the one trump card we have. You’re a smart man, so think about it with your own head. What kind of offers do you think other countries will make to Seoha? And we’re going to threaten him?
Please do not force Seoha to choose American citizenship.”
It was the most cost-effective solution that had occurred to the mind of a man who had lived his entire life as a bureaucrat.
The minister’s face flushed red.
“…I was being shortsighted. You’re right, Professor.”
The minister roughly loosened his tie with a weary expression. Now was not the time to think about his own achievements.
“Then how should we approach him?”
“Offer him a legitimate partnership. You will have to promise complete autonomy, full support, and a share of the rights to the resulting patents. Frankly, even that won’t be enough. You’ll need a great deal more on top of it.”
The minister’s mouth fell open.
“A share, too? Has there ever been such a case in a national project?”
“I’ve said all I came to say. That is for the higher-ups to gather and discuss. But before you make an offer, please remember this one thing.”
She looked the minister straight in the eye and said,
“If you try to rely on patriotism, you will fail.”
How had the United States come to lead the world in technology?
It was because the country did not exploit geniuses. For instance, if it were America, they would make Seoha this sort of offer.
They would provide the funding he needed, so he should start a company. The state would become his biggest customer.
Palantir became the leader of the global security data industry in precisely this manner.
‘What kind of offer can you people make to Seoha?’
The minister paced anxiously, then picked up the phone and arranged an appointment with the president. Jiyun watched him for a moment before leaving the office.
* * *
In Korea, news poured out day after day. It was because the minister had made such a noisy move.
[Emergency Diagnosis: Riemann Hypothesis Likely Proven! Is the Balance in My Bank Account Safe?]
[The Teen Mathematician Who Brought Down the World’s Digital Ecosystem with a Single Pen, Yu Seoha]
Every broadcasting station, whether terrestrial or cable, organized emergency programs.
Mathematicians, cryptographers, IT security experts, and even economists were called into studios, sweating profusely as they explained the situation.
“…Therefore, viewers, there is no need to worry too much. Encryption being rendered powerless—it simply isn’t that easy, you see?”
“Professor, you may be in computer science, but… this is a mathematical problem. RSA is certain to collapse soon. I’ve already converted all the money in my account into physical gold.”
“But does Yu Seoha truly bear no responsibility for this situation?”
“You want to hold a scholar responsible for discovering a law of nature? Then let’s say every death by falling is Newton’s fault for discovering universal gravitation.”
“Why are you saying it like that? Are you trying to start a fight?”
Images of Seoha that had been released little by little until now were repeatedly broadcast on screen.
The sight of him standing before a large blackboard, lost in thought with a piece of chalk in his hand.
His face still had a youthful softness to it. However, the public was freshly shocked by the fact that the proof he had achieved was shaking the entire world.
└So you’re saying the balance in my overdraft account could be reset to 0 won too? Praise Yu Seoha!
└Nope, the hacker’s gonna add another zero to your loan lol
└This is seriously like a movie. Where did the guy who said the proof was fake go?
└A movie? Let’s make the genre apocalypse.
└If they crack nuclear missile launch codes, it really might be lol
At the same time, at MIT.
Whether he knew that the world was engaged in heated debate over him or not, the air inside Apex Lab was nothing but peaceful.
The people who had been called in were performing their duties admirably. Seoha was so absorbed in the fun of writing his textbook that he had lost all track of time.
But the peace lasted only a moment.
People of various races, dressed in black suits, began visiting MIT one after another.