Location: Headquarters of the French Defence Procurement Agency (DGA), Boulevard Victor (Paris)
Date: February 1989
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on the flow of the meeting)
The complex of the Directorate General of Armaments, in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris, commanded respect by its strict austerity. After passing through three checkpoints, leaving their IDs and walking through a maze of underground corridors with grey painted concrete walls, the Volta S.A. team was ushered into a secure, blind meeting room lit by crackling neon lights.
The air was dry, saturated with the smell of filter coffee that had been on its hot plate for too long.
On one side of the large Formica table stood two men. Colonel Lemaire, Director of Technology Procurement for the Defence, displayed the pragmatic air of an officer accustomed to budget negotiations. To his left, Dr. Arnault, chief engineer and director of the cryptanalysis department, was poring over a file with the haughty detachment of great academics.
On the other side the representatives of Volta took up their seats. Alexandre de Vigan, in a midnight blue double-breasted suit, put down his briefcase with measured elegance. Karim Belkacem, visibly uncomfortable in this military environment, prudently placed a heavy padded carrying case, of the Pelican case, on an empty chair. In the center, twenty-two-year-old Lazare Bonaparte took his place. His face was neutral, concentrated, devoid of the slightest provocation.
"Gentlemen," Colonel Lemaire began, closing his file. "Monsieur de Vigan has praised to me at length the merits of your new researches. The DGA has been a Volta client for two years. Your V-1 hardware modules power our banking terminals and some of our networks. But you now claim to have designed an IT architecture capable of making our own data centres obsolete. »
Doctor Arnault smiled skeptically, adjusting his bifocals.
"To be quite frank, Monsieur Bonaparte, I have read the preliminary specifications that your commercial director has sent us," the chief engineer interjected. "A multiprocessor RISC architecture manufactured by a small-scale civilian company... It's daring. But we're not talking about running secretarial software here. My department rents time on American Cray supercomputers and uses heavy architectures from Bull. These are cabinets that weigh a ton, require three-phase current and liquid cooling. So, I ask you: where is your famous machine? In a truck in our parking lot? »
Lazare calmly turned his head to his technical director. "Karim."
The engineer rose. He hoisted the heavy black briefcase onto the table, popped the metal latches, and opened the honeycomb lid.
The result was a rectangular, all-black case that was barely larger than a typical personal computer tower. The chassis was made of thick brushed aluminum, pierced with thin ventilation grilles on the edges. On the front, no superfluous buttons. Just a power switch and the silver Volta logo.
Karim placed the prototype of the IMPERATOR server in the center of the table.
Silence set in. Doctor Arnault looked at the metal box, then turned his attention back to Lazarus, his eyes filled with deep irritation.
"Is that a joke?" the cryptanalyst asked. "Are you planning to process our military algorithms with a desktop computer?"
"The physical volume of a machine no longer defines its processing power, Doctor," Lazarus replied calmly. "The architecture of the motherboard is. This box contains the IMPERATOR platform. It is a symmetrical environment. It features a VESLA-II core processor with four cores, a SONG-II coprocessor, and a unified system controller that handles real-time error correction. The whole thing consumes less than a hundred watts and plugs into a standard 220-volt AC outlet. »
Arnault crossed his arms, closing his face.
"Very good. Enough theory. Since you claim to have designed a mathematical war machine, we will test it in our own way," the DGA engineer decided.
He opened his leather satchel and took out a five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disk, marked with a red "SECRET DEFENSE" stamp.
"For the past month," Colonel Lemaire explained, instinctively lowering his voice, "our listening stations have intercepted new encrypted transmissions from the Soviet embassy. The KGB has just changed its encryption standard. They use a new algorithm being tested, GOST 28147-89. »
Karim, despite his nervousness, widened his eyes slightly. He was aware of the reputation of this standard in the research community.
"A thirty-two-tower Feistel network, with a 256-bit key," whispered Volta's technical director.
"Exactly," confirmed Dr. Arnault, a little surprised by the young man's erudition. "By way of comparison, the DES standard used by the Americans is limited to 56 bits. GOST is an absolute digital fortress. »
The chief engineer slid the floppy disk on the formica to Karim.
"Our mathematicians have worked hard," Arnault continued. "We found a theoretical vulnerability in the way they generate their substitute boxes. This allows us to drastically reduce the space of possible keys. But even with this mathematical shortcut, we still have a colossal volume of combinations to test in brute force. »
Doctor Arnault patted the file in front of him.
"Our data center estimated the time it would take to break this intercepted snippet to be about three weeks of uninterrupted processing on our current servers. Show us what your aluminum box can do. »
Karim took the floppy disk. He unrolled the power cable from the IMPERATOR server and plugged it into the wall outlet in the meeting room. He then connected the device to a heavy cathode ray monitor and a keyboard that the DGA had made available to them. He pressed the switch.
A slight breath was heard. The whisper of fans pulling air out of the case. The screen lit up.
Dr. Arnault expected to see a black screen saturated with white command lines, the absolute standard for professional UNIX systems. To his amazement, after only about fifteen seconds of loading, a sleek graphical interface appeared. Smooth-edged windows, folder icons, a mouse pointer.
"A graphical interface?" Arnault almost choked. "On a high-performance computing server? This is heresy! You're wasting precious clock cycles to display drawings! »
" VoltaOS Server is designed to strictly separate the interface from the kernel, Doctor," Lazarus said calmly. "The display is natively managed and does not weigh on the central processor. Ergonomics is not a secretarial gimmick. An officer does not have to learn complex syntax to initiate a critical operation. »
Karim inserted the Soviet floppy disk into the server's drive. He dragged the encrypted file icon into the directory of the cryptanalysis application that his team had coded specifically for Defense. A small dialog box opened on the screen: Material Resource Allocation.
"This is where the IMPERATOR architecture comes into its own," Lazare explained, leaning forward slightly. "If I use the CPU to break this code, it will actually take days. A CPU is like a brilliant math teacher: it's designed to solve very complex problems, sequentially, one after the other. But brute force key breaking isn't a complex problem. It's a basic arithmetic operation, which you just have to repeat millions of times. »
Karim, using the mouse, ignored the VESLA-II line in the drop-down menu. He clicked on the SONG-II line. Then he pressed the "Run" button.
"That's why we use the coprocessor," Lazare continued. " SONG was originally designed to compute hundreds of thousands of textured polygons simultaneously on a graphical screen. We simply modified the software libraries of the OS. Instead of asking it to calculate pixels in 3D, the system asks it to run the GOST algorithm on thousands of possible keys at the same time. A GPU is not a brilliant teacher. It's an army of a thousand high school students who do simple additions simultaneously. It's massively parallel processing. »
Doctor Arnault froze in his chair. The very concept of deflecting a graphical display chip to perform cryptanalysis did not exist in any engineering textbook in 1989.
Silence fell again in the meeting room. On the monitor screen, a simple progress bar had appeared. Below it, a counter displayed the number of keys tested per second. The numbers passed by at such a speed that they were nothing more than a continuous blur, a digital vibration.
The chief cryptanalyst pulled out his chair, approaching the screen, his eyes wide open at the speed displayed by the meter. The waiter didn't flinch. The aluminum chassis began to warm under the stress of the chips engraved to one micron, but the noise of the ventilation remained confined to a simple discreet breath.
The minutes stretched out. The coffee in the cups cools completely. Alexandre de Vigan thoughtfully smoothed the folds of his trousers, displaying a relaxed façade. Lazarus, on the other hand, stared at the opposite wall, impassive, letting mathematics prove its supremacy.
After thirty-eight minutes and fourteen seconds, a brief audible signal sounded in the room.
The progress bar disappeared. VoltaOS 's graphical interface froze the process and opened a simple full-screen text editor.
Inside, the Cyrillic alphabet. A clear, structured, decoded text. A routine report from the Soviet embassy concerning diplomatic bag schedules.
Colonel Lemaire stood up abruptly, placing both hands flat on the table to lean towards the screen. Doctor Arnault took off his spectacles, frantically wiped them with his handkerchief, and put them back on, rereading the Russian words as if it were a hallucination.
Three weeks of calculations planned on an institutional monster. Thirty-eight minutes on a sixty-watt aluminum box.
"It's... it's impossible," whispered the DGA engineer, his complexion pale. "The architecture of a conventional processor cannot handle such a data rate without saturating its memory buses... »
"You don't use classical architecture, Doctor," Lazarus replied with clinical neutrality. "You use sovereign architecture."
Colonel Lemaire slowly straightened up. He looked at the young leader of Volta, then at the little black machine that had just shattered the certainties of the largest French intelligence department. The arrogance and skepticism of the general staff had just been vaporized.
Alexandre de Vigan uncrossed his legs. The time for negotiation had arrived. The black box had spoken; it was now up to commerce to set the price of silence and power.
Location: Headquarters of the French Defence Procurement Agency (DGA), Boulevard Victor (Paris)
Date: February 1989
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on the flow of the meeting)
The CRT monitor screen displayed Russian text in plain text. The steady breath of the IMPERATOR server ventilation was the only noise that disturbed the heavy silence of the meeting room.
Dr. Arnault, the head of the cryptanalysis department, reread the intercepted document a third time. It wasn't a simulation. The machine in front of him had just pulverized the latest encryption standard of the Soviet bloc in less than forty minutes, relegating the ministry's supercomputers to the rank of pocket calculators.
Colonel Lemaire cleared his throat, trying to regain control of the meeting. As a good purchasing manager, he immediately compartmentalized the technical feat to concentrate on acquisition.
"It's a demonstration... conclusive, Monsieur Bonaparte," admitted the soldier, trying to conceal his eagerness. "This equipment will considerably accelerate our intelligence collection capabilities. Mr de Vigan, I would like us to discuss an initial order to equip our laboratories in Boulogne-Billancourt. A dozen of these servers should be enough to... »
"I'll stop you at once, Colonel," Lazare said calmly.
The young CEO had not moved from his chair. He wasn't smiling. He kept his hands crossed on the formica of the table.
"You only saw half the problem," Lazarus continued. "You look at this server as an offensive weapon. You are delighted to be able to read the letters from KGB diplomats. But the real lesson of this test is not the vulnerability of the Soviets. It's yours. »
Doctor Arnault stopped staring at the screen and slowly turned his head towards the twenty-two-year-old engineer.
"Ours?" asked Lemaire, his brows furrowed. "Our command networks are among the most secure in Europe. By the way, we use your own hardware modules. The V-1 cases we bought from you two years ago. »
"Exactly," Lazare agreed. "The V-1 module was a great product in 1986. It intercepts the data at the exit of your computers and encrypts it on the fly thanks to a dedicated chip. It is a hardware-based, fast, machine-independent security. But it has one major flaw: the length of its encryption key is physically engraved in silicon. It is frozen. »
Lazarus pointed to the black aluminum case with a slight movement of his chin.
"If we, a civil company in the Paris suburbs, were able to design a massively parallel architecture capable of testing millions of keys per second... What do you think the NSA or Soviet military laboratories are developing in their basements? »
Doctor Arnault's blood ran wild. The cryptanalyst's scientific mind had just put the pieces of the puzzle together with terrifying lucidity.
"Asymmetric computing power... Arnault murmured, his complexion suddenly pale. "If the enemy has hijacked GPUs like yours, the key length of our V-1 modules is no longer sufficient to withstand a brute force attack."
"You get it, Doctor," Lazarus confirmed clinically. "In IT, security is only a matter of time. With this type of server, the time needed to break the V-1 module has just gone by several years... to a few months. Tomorrow will be a few weeks. Your armored door has not changed, but burglars have just equipped themselves with industrial explosives. The V-1 cases are technologically dead. »
Colonel Lemaire took the blow. The euphoria of having uncovered Russian secrets evaporated instantly, replaced by the cold paranoia of the intelligence officer realizing that his own lines of communication were compromised.
"Are you telling me that the millions of francs we invested in your equipment two years ago have gone up in smoke?" asked Lemaire, his jaw clenched, anger pointing under administrative courtesy.
"I'm telling you that computers are evolving and that hardware patches are no longer enough, Colonel," Lazare corrected without being impressed. "Securing a network by plugging a small box into the output of an obsolete computer is a dead end. Security needs to be built into the root. It must be part of the very foundations of the operating system and the central architecture. »
Lazarus nodded slightly to Karim.
Volta's technical director took up the mouse again. He closed the text editor containing the Russian message and opened the VoltaOS Server network administration panel. The interface, clean and structured, displayed the machine's communication protocols.
"We didn't just design this server to attack," Lazare explained. "We designed it to defend. Take a good look at the architecture. You know that the VESLA-II handles the central computing and the SONG-II handles parallelism. But there is a third chip on our motherboard. We call it the CENTURION. »
Karim clicked on the system's security tab. A cryptographic setting window appeared, offering key lengths that could be adjusted by a simple slider.
"The CENTURION is our unified system controller," Lazare said, his voice steady. "He is the one who manages all the inputs and outputs of the server, the Ethernet network, and the correction of errors in real time. And it's the one that hosts our new crypto engine. In VoltaOS, encryption is no longer an option added at the end. He is a native. Every data packet that enters or leaves the server is encrypted by the CENTURION in total symbiosis with the system kernel. »
Doctor Arnault adjusted his glasses, leaning over the screen again, fascinated by the software's flexibility.
"Is this an asymmetric algorithm?" the expert asked.
"Totally," Karim replied, taking over the software aspect. "And the big difference with your old V-1 cases is that the length of the key is no longer fixed in copper. It is the software that dictates complexity to the hardware controller. If, in three years' time, you feel that enemy computers have become too fast, you won't need to change your machines or disconnect cables. All you need to do is do a VoltaOS software update to double or quadruple the size of the key. The robustness is infinite and scalable. »
Lazarus let the argument infuse the minds of the two officials. He had just closed the trap with watchmaking precision.
He had first shown them that the world was entering an era of supercomputing that was rendering the old defenses useless. Then, it offered them the only antidote available on the market: absolute vertical integration, where the hardware (the server) and the software (the OS) were one to guarantee the inviolability of the data. If they wanted to keep their operations secret, the DGA had no choice but to replace its entire computer park with Volta machines.
Colonel Lemaire exchanged a long, silent glance with Doctor Arnault. The latter nodded slowly. The chief engineer's diagnosis was clear: technically, Volta was years ahead of anything else being done at Bull or IBM. Their proprietary algorithms, backed by the CENTURION chip, were the new standard.
Lemaire sighed, leaning back in his Formica chair. Pragmatism was taking over.
"Well done, Monsieur Bonaparte," conceded the Colonel in a weary but respectful tone. "You have just invalidated my entire secure staff infrastructure in the space of an hour. My supervising minister is going to make an attack when I present him with the bill for the renewal. »
For the first time since the beginning of the meeting, Alexandre de Vigan spoke. The sales manager opened his fine leather briefcase and took out a cardboard folder containing finely calculated pricing grids.
"The price of national sovereignty is always justified, Colonel," de Vigan interjected in that hushed and reassuring tone characteristic of investment bankers. "Especially since we have planned a transition program for our institutional partners. We will take back your old V-1 modules for a discount on the acquisition of IMPERATOR servers. We suggest that you start by deploying about fifty machines for your cryptanalysis and strategic command nerve centers, including unlimited VoltaOS Server licenses. »
De Vigan dragged the commercial documents onto the table.
"And don't worry," the salesman added with a thin smile. "Unlike American supercomputers, our machines do not need maintenance contracts that include foreign technicians visiting your basement. The equipment is assembled in France, and the source code can be audited by your services. Absolute safety, in a closed loop. »
Colonel Lemaire took the contract and quickly glanced at it. The amounts were colossal, but justified by the technological leap.
"I will transmit this file to the budget department this afternoon, with the favorable opinion of the scientific department," concludes Lemaire, putting the documents in his own bag. "We'll have to do some load testing in siloed environments before the final deployment, of course."
"The test machine is yours," Lazarus said, pointing to the black waiter who continued to purr on the table. "Do what you want to do to him. It will not weaken. »
Volta's team stood up. Handshakes were exchanged, firm and professional. There were no triumphant smiles, no grandiloquent declarations. It was just a business transaction in a basement room.
However, as he walked up the long grey corridor of the DGA, supervised by Karim and de Vigan, Lazare knew full well what had just happened. He had not just sold servers to the French army. He had just implanted the central nervous system of his technology in the heart of the state.
The American standard had just been officially expelled from the Department of Defense. The slow, silent, and relentless march of sovereign computing had just reached a new stage. And the year 1989 had only just begun.