Fic: Someone's Got a New Desktop Wallpaper
Someone's Got a New Desktop Wallpaper
by Astapez
Not Beta'd so whoever wants to read it over and tell me if I'm being too geeky or raping the English language too much, let me know please!
Inspired by Random_Nexus' Fic
http://random-nexus.livejournal.com/168457.html
Now has a sequel, link at end of post.
John Watson had survived college and postgraduate school in order to be a doctor. He could learn and adapt and that's why he was valuable to his teammates in Afghanistan and Sherlock in England. Or, he was valuable most of the time. Right now, Sherlock was a little annoyed at John because he had learned how to pick passwords that were harder for Sherlock to guess, and so now he had to wait for his rainbow table attack to return John's password. It was getting longer and harder for Sherlock to crack every time he changed it, and he wouldn't be surprised if John had actually been studying electronic cryptography in his spare time as of late. He'd been unusually focused on the computer and had, damn the man, learned how to clear out his browsing history and cookies.
Ever since he'd started taking tea once or twice a week with their neighbor, Marie Turner (IT professional,network administrator for a bank and was completely boring right up until she started teaching John how to be irritating) John's typing skills had vaguely started improving, he started having less arguments with pin machines, and his passwords suddenly got very hard to crack.
The rainbow table of hashes that Sherlock had shelled out over fifty pounds of his own money to get, just to break into John's computer (because he didn't have time to guess all the letters and numbers John could have put together, and this had become somewhat of a game between them, so now Sherlock needed to get the computer to access its stored list of valid passwords and decrypt them with the proper hashes but there were just so many when John's passwords started getting more secure) returned null.
Well, shit. John had either started using cryptographic salt, which was not outside the bounds of likelihood (As Marie was probably using such one-way extra bits to keep the bank's authentication secure) or was now using a longer password than his table presupposed, and probably special characters, such as @, #, &, and the latter seemed more likely.
Sherlock called the vendor of the rainbow table he had, and asked about their premium version. Support for more characters, and longer passwords. It would be gigabytes in size and cost almost as much as the RAM and hard drive in the laptop combined, but, Sherlock reasoned, it could prove useful to have such a powerful brute force attack at his disposal in a later case.
An hour and almost forty-five minutes later, John was still out doing whatever it was he usually did early Tuesday afternoons (chance of him being at the clinic 70%, other doctors had been getting sick lately and John would certainly pick up an extra shift if needed) and Sherlock's upgraded rainbow table revealed
myc4@ftisa$$h0le#$h3rl0ckf^ckyOuh!av3y0u4*wnl@pt0-
Sherlock's jaw dropped at the complexity of the password (the source wasn't hard to remember- mycroft is asshole sherlock fuck you have your own laptop)- how had John remembered where to stick the numbers and special characters? And not all of the vowels were replaced, and not all the special characters were replacements either. That pound symbol was filler. John had to have written it down somewhere.
But that wasn't the entire shock. No, even as Sherlock was making a mental note to search John's things for where he was writing down his passwords, and entering the long (impressively long and so secure and this made a weirdly warm feeling of accomplishment squiggle in his intestines) password into the authentication box to log into the computer, Sherlock couldn't help but feel there was probably more.
John almost, but didn't quite, drop his key to the flat when he heard Sherlock shriek from outside the door. Balancing the bag from
Tesco's on his hip, and replacing the key in the hole, he unlocked the door, ready to fend off a Lovecraftian horror in their sitting
room (because, honestly, what would make Sherlock shriek like that?) but found that Sherlock had managed to crack his password (guess he'll have to take Marie up on that offer of cryptographic salt after all, this proves that Sherlock was using a really nice rainbow table) and was staring at John's new desktop wallpaper.
Which Marie had helpfully added to his operating system itself, along with a script to change it back to that wallpaper if it was ever changed away. Because John liked this wallpaper and didn't want Sherlock to take it away.
After all, Sherlock had looked adorable snuggled up with his violin and one of John's jumpers, face slack in sleep and (while the picture couldn't capture them, John's memory did) making little snuffly noises.
Yes, John thought as Sherlock got him involved in some heated discussion about bugs in the flat and lengthy passwords and he put the groceries away, computers were definitely worth learning.
And the sequel, Someone's Got a New Cell Phone Ring Tone
And the interquel, The Hackneyed Jet Li Movie Plot
by Astapez
Not Beta'd so whoever wants to read it over and tell me if I'm being too geeky or raping the English language too much, let me know please!
Inspired by Random_Nexus' Fic
http://random-nexus.livejournal.com/168457.html
Now has a sequel, link at end of post.
John Watson had survived college and postgraduate school in order to be a doctor. He could learn and adapt and that's why he was valuable to his teammates in Afghanistan and Sherlock in England. Or, he was valuable most of the time. Right now, Sherlock was a little annoyed at John because he had learned how to pick passwords that were harder for Sherlock to guess, and so now he had to wait for his rainbow table attack to return John's password. It was getting longer and harder for Sherlock to crack every time he changed it, and he wouldn't be surprised if John had actually been studying electronic cryptography in his spare time as of late. He'd been unusually focused on the computer and had, damn the man, learned how to clear out his browsing history and cookies.
Ever since he'd started taking tea once or twice a week with their neighbor, Marie Turner (IT professional,network administrator for a bank and was completely boring right up until she started teaching John how to be irritating) John's typing skills had vaguely started improving, he started having less arguments with pin machines, and his passwords suddenly got very hard to crack.
The rainbow table of hashes that Sherlock had shelled out over fifty pounds of his own money to get, just to break into John's computer (because he didn't have time to guess all the letters and numbers John could have put together, and this had become somewhat of a game between them, so now Sherlock needed to get the computer to access its stored list of valid passwords and decrypt them with the proper hashes but there were just so many when John's passwords started getting more secure) returned null.
Well, shit. John had either started using cryptographic salt, which was not outside the bounds of likelihood (As Marie was probably using such one-way extra bits to keep the bank's authentication secure) or was now using a longer password than his table presupposed, and probably special characters, such as @, #, &, and the latter seemed more likely.
Sherlock called the vendor of the rainbow table he had, and asked about their premium version. Support for more characters, and longer passwords. It would be gigabytes in size and cost almost as much as the RAM and hard drive in the laptop combined, but, Sherlock reasoned, it could prove useful to have such a powerful brute force attack at his disposal in a later case.
An hour and almost forty-five minutes later, John was still out doing whatever it was he usually did early Tuesday afternoons (chance of him being at the clinic 70%, other doctors had been getting sick lately and John would certainly pick up an extra shift if needed) and Sherlock's upgraded rainbow table revealed
myc4@ftisa$$h0le#$h3rl0ckf^ckyOuh!av3y0u4*wnl@pt0-
Sherlock's jaw dropped at the complexity of the password (the source wasn't hard to remember- mycroft is asshole sherlock fuck you have your own laptop)- how had John remembered where to stick the numbers and special characters? And not all of the vowels were replaced, and not all the special characters were replacements either. That pound symbol was filler. John had to have written it down somewhere.
But that wasn't the entire shock. No, even as Sherlock was making a mental note to search John's things for where he was writing down his passwords, and entering the long (impressively long and so secure and this made a weirdly warm feeling of accomplishment squiggle in his intestines) password into the authentication box to log into the computer, Sherlock couldn't help but feel there was probably more.
John almost, but didn't quite, drop his key to the flat when he heard Sherlock shriek from outside the door. Balancing the bag from
Tesco's on his hip, and replacing the key in the hole, he unlocked the door, ready to fend off a Lovecraftian horror in their sitting
room (because, honestly, what would make Sherlock shriek like that?) but found that Sherlock had managed to crack his password (guess he'll have to take Marie up on that offer of cryptographic salt after all, this proves that Sherlock was using a really nice rainbow table) and was staring at John's new desktop wallpaper.
Which Marie had helpfully added to his operating system itself, along with a script to change it back to that wallpaper if it was ever changed away. Because John liked this wallpaper and didn't want Sherlock to take it away.
After all, Sherlock had looked adorable snuggled up with his violin and one of John's jumpers, face slack in sleep and (while the picture couldn't capture them, John's memory did) making little snuffly noises.
Yes, John thought as Sherlock got him involved in some heated discussion about bugs in the flat and lengthy passwords and he put the groceries away, computers were definitely worth learning.
And the sequel, Someone's Got a New Cell Phone Ring Tone
And the interquel, The Hackneyed Jet Li Movie Plot