A short preface, but it seems that Alcon doesn't mind his story being shared and spread, so there shouldn't be a very complex password. With Cube's powerful computing ability, if the direction is correct, decryption should not be a problem.
"Cube, do you remember that war?"
"Yes, I've pulled up the information for you. It was a civil war over 30 years ago." Cube quickly displayed the information on my terminal screen.
"It looks like Alcon's father participated in the war, and it seems he held a high position. Do you have any information on which general had a son named Alcon?"
"No, I don't. I searched the database, but there was no match."
I started to go through the information on the war that Cube had found. Although I had roughly studied this history during my student years, my memory of the impression of this war was limited to my parents' accounts of the tight supply of living materials during and after the war. My understanding of the war primarily revolved around the subsequent efforts of reconstruction and political movements. It had always been portrayed as a historical event in which violence was employed to address conflicts and, ultimately, establish peace. Generally, most people regarded it as an "unnecessary war caused by incompetent leaders."
The origin of the war began when the newly elected leaders of two counties in the federation jointly proposed to secede from the federation. They believed that the federation's resource allocation laws were unfair to them. These two counties possessed significant natural resources that were vital to the federation's strategy. After years of legal disputes with no resolution in sight, the hardline leaders who were eventually elected advocated for a gradual withdrawal from the federation. However, the federation immediately vetoed the proposal for gradual independence. In the absence of conclusive results from multiple referendums, a radical faction from one county proposed a measure for forced secession. They intercepted resource trains bound for the federation to gain leverage. Unfortunately, during the interception, they shot and killed federal soldiers guarding the train and destroyed the train's route. This incident escalated into terrorism, and the war subsequently erupted.
In addition, two other resource-rich and economically strong counties had reservations about the resource allocation laws and joined the opposition against the federation. The conflict expanded into a civil war between these three counties and the remaining eleven counties. The war lasted for over two years and finally concluded when the federal military employed tactical nuclear weapons to eliminate all the opposing leaders.
After this war more than thirty years ago, there followed over ten years of reflection. The leaders of the federation at that time had already stepped down. The peace was hard-won, making everyone work harder to rebuild and establish a legal order. As the successor leaders of the federation continued to change, this war gradually faded out of people's sight and became history.
Who was Alcon's father? I opened his log directory again. Each log was neatly numbered from 01, and each log file size was different. Cube had decrypted the first one, and I suddenly remembered his first sentence, "Only the order matters, not the length." Order? I suddenly realized that Alcon's logs were named in order, starting with #0, #1, and so on.
"Cube, try decrypting the second log using this method: append a number after Ami&Alcon, and then append # and the Base64 encoding of the number as the key. Decrypt using symmetric encryption. The numbers should be formatted as 3 digits with leading zeros, 2 digits with leading zeros, or without leading zeros."
After a while, Cube responded, "Kurt, I tried once but found no meaningful information. However, I want to try the algorithm you mentioned with the original key QW1pJkFsY29u, and also try other text encoding methods. Please wait a moment."
"Kurt, I think I've found a pattern. The key for the second log is the hash of QW1pJkFsY29u#2, which is '28f7e86916b5bad703edd99a0028aab967b8de16bedd60fe94830153b7332d9e'. The decrypted data has meaningful information, and the numbers start from #0 and increase in order of #1, #2. I can decrypt the other logs by calculating the keys accordingly!"
"That's great, thank you, Cube. Can you archive the file for me and put it on the screen?"
"Sure, it's done. Do you want coffee or music?" Cube replied cheerfully.
"Yes, please. Thank you!" I eagerly began to read Alcon's log...