"I'm dialing a phone number," I said, my fingers dancing across the keys: ssh [email protected] -p 2200. "A very, very secure phone number."
A prompt appeared: Password. I typed in my ridiculously long passphrase.
Another prompt appeared: Enter YubiKey 2FA code. I pulled the small, key-shaped device from my keychain and plugged it into my laptop's USB-C port. I tapped its gold disc. A long string of characters filled the screen, and I hit enter.
I was in.
The terminal prompt changed. I was now inside a gateway server, a digital lobby in a very secure, very secret building somewhere deep in the hills of Virginia. From here, I had to hop through two more layers of security—a process that involved authenticating my credentials against a different server in Colorado and passing a cryptographic challenge-response test.
To Miller, it just looked like I was typing gibberish.
"I'm telling a very powerful, very expensive computer in a bunker in Virginia to wake up and pay attention to you guys," I narrated, partly for his benefit and partly for my own. "It's like a long-distance booty call for data. You have to whisper all the right sweet nothings to get it interested."
Finally, I arrived at my destination: the command line interface for the regional COOP network switch. I had the power. I typed the commands, my fingers moving with a speed and confidence that came from years of doing this:
Plaintext
enable
configure terminal
interface gi 1/0/48
description **EMERGENCY ACTIVATION - SERENITY SPRINGS SUBSTATION - LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE SABOTAGE**
no shutdown
ip address dhcp
exit
I hit the final enter key on my screen. I started a simple timer script.
Now, we waited for the network to do its thing: for the request to travel to the satellite, get authenticated, for the switch here to be provisioned, and for the data to start flowing. The technical term is propagation delay.
One minute passed. Sergeant Davis's impatient voice echoed from the main room: "Anything yet, computer man?"
"Patience is a virtue, Sergeant!" I called back. "Greatness takes time."