The Spy

GlagalCloud had partitions, access rules, checkpoints, and redundancy. It was reliable, efficient, and growing. It was also, as Glagalbagal was about to discover, not at all secure.

The Leak

Bretchka the rancher noticed something odd at the regional livestock auction. A competing rancher named Skvelj — a man known for aggressive pricing and minimal scruples — had bid on exactly the breeds and quantities that Bretchka had been planning to sell. Skvelj's bids arrived moments before Bretchka's, consistently undercutting her by narrow margins. It was as if Skvelj knew Bretchka's inventory before she announced it.

Bretchka stormed into GlagalCloud's cave on a Thursday.

Bretchka: Someone is reading my records.

Glagalbagal: That is not possible. Your records are on your shelves, behind your partition, accessible only through your task cards.

Bretchka: Then explain how Skvelj knows that I have forty-three head of Brontj highland cattle ready for sale next month. I have told no one. The only place that information exists is in my GlagalCloud records.

Glagalbagal investigated. The access logs — a new feature Blortz had introduced after the Gnelvik dinosaur incident, recording every shelf access with a timestamp and the velociraptor's identifier — showed something troubling. A velociraptor named Thjelvk had accessed Bretchka's shelf section fourteen times in the past month. Thjelvk was not assigned to any of Bretchka's tasks.

Further investigation revealed that Skvelj had paid Thjelvk two trade-units per week for the information. The access rule from Part 30 required a matching task card — but Thjelvk had simply fabricated one. The task cards were stone chips with a customer code carved on them. Carving a fake one took about three minutes.

Blortz: The access rules assume honest velociraptors. We have a dishonest one.

Glagalbagal: We have a system that can be bypassed by anyone with a chisel and three minutes.

The Identity Problem

The fundamental issue was authentication — how did GlagalCloud verify that a velociraptor was who it claimed to be, and that a task card was genuine? Currently, the system relied on trust. A velociraptor presented a task card, and the system assumed the card was legitimate. There was no verification.

Glagalbagal's first fix was to make task cards harder to forge. Instead of a simple customer code, each task card now contained a secret word — a sequence of pebbles known only to Glagalbagal and the customer. When a velociraptor accessed a shelf, it presented the task card, and a supervising velociraptor checked the secret word against a master list kept in a locked stone box.

This was a password system. Each customer chose a secret word. The word was stored in the master list. Access required presenting the correct word.

Blortz: And if another velociraptor sees the secret word while the task card is being checked?

Glagalbagal: They would need to memorise it.

Blortz: Velociraptors have excellent memories. That is, in fact, what we pay them for.

The password system was better than nothing but had an obvious flaw: anyone who observed the password could use it. And the bribed velociraptor — the very threat they were trying to prevent — would have access to the passwords as part of their normal duties.

A velociraptor sneaking a look at another customer's shelf section while a second velociraptor is distracted — a shadowy, conspiratorial scene in the cave with dramatic lighting

The Rotating Password

Blortz proposed rotating the passwords — changing each customer's secret word every month. Even if a velociraptor memorised a password, it would be useless within weeks.

This helped but created a logistics problem. Each month, new passwords had to be communicated to customers via pterodactyl. The pterodactyl carrying the new password was itself a security risk — if it was intercepted, the password was compromised before it was even used.

Glagalbagal: We need to send the password secretly.

Blortz: Sending something secretly is the entire problem. If we could send things secretly, we would not need passwords.

This was circular, and both of them knew it. The password protected the data, but the password itself needed protection during transmission. Protecting the password required... another password? The problem of securing information in transit was not something a password system could solve.

Glagalbagal tabled the transmission problem for now and focused on what he could control inside the cave. He fired Thjelvk (who protested that he had only been following market incentives, which was technically true and entirely beside the point), hired a replacement with stronger references, and implemented a new policy: no velociraptor worked on the same customer's data for more than two consecutive months. Rotation reduced the opportunity for a single velociraptor to build a covert relationship with an outside party.

Bretchka: And my data is safe now?

Glagalbagal: Safer. I cannot promise safe. But the cost of breaching it is higher than it was, and we will keep raising that cost.

Bretchka: That is not reassuring.

Glagalbagal: It is honest.

GlagalCloud has discovered that security is not a feature you add — it is a property of the entire system, and it is never complete. Passwords are the oldest form of computer security, and they have exactly the weaknesses Glagalbagal found: they can be stolen, observed, or guessed. Modern systems address this with multi-factor authentication (something you know + something you have + something you are), but every layer adds complexity. The deeper problem Glagalbagal identified — how do you securely share a secret over an insecure channel? — is one of the fundamental questions of cryptography, and it was not solved until the 1970s. Before reading the next part, think about this: if you and a friend need to agree on a secret code, but every message you send can be read by an eavesdropper, how would you do it? Is it even possible?