Daina Bouquin: Every night for over seven hundred years, the exact same thing has happened at the Tower of London.
Daina Bouquin: In the dark, the chief yeoman warder walks to the outer gates.
Daina Bouquin: Challenges are called out into the night air.
Daina Bouquin: Passwords are exchanged.
Daina Bouquin: The heavy wooden doors are locked, and the keys are secured until morning.
Daina Bouquin: It has happened through plagues.
Daina Bouquin: It has happened while bombs fell during the Blitz.
Daina Bouquin: The ritual has never been skipped.
Daina Bouquin: We do this because humans have always understood something about security.
Daina Bouquin: Certain things require a ritual, not just because the ritual makes us safe, but because it makes trust visible.
Daina Bouquin: Back in 2008, a security researcher named Dan Kaminsky realized that the internet's core directory was unprotected.
Daina Bouquin: It was a well without a lid, vulnerable to anyone who wanted to secretly poison the water and redirect the world's digital traffic.
Daina Bouquin: He forced the architects of the web to build a heavy cryptographic lid to protect the directory from poisoning.
Daina Bouquin: A master key to lock the internet's route.
Daina Bouquin: That story is its own episode and it's worth your time.
Daina Bouquin: But a master key creates a new terrifying problem.
Daina Bouquin: If you give it to one person, they become a target.
Daina Bouquin: If you give it to a single government, it becomes a weapon of politics.
Daina Bouquin: So they broke the key apart and scattered the fragments.
Daina Bouquin: I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Lore in the Machine.
Daina Bouquin: There are only 14 people in the world who hold the title crypto officer.
Daina Bouquin: They are not spies or government agents.
Daina Bouquin: They are trusted volunteers, like Swedish internet expert Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder, who stored a piece of the key on a long metal chain inside a wooden puzzle box with a hidden lock.
Daina Bouquin: Her son made the box in his workshop.
Daina Bouquin: He also made furniture.
Daina Bouquin: Four times a year, a handful of crypto officers pack their bags, get on airplanes, and travel to a secure facility in either Culpeper, Virginia, or El Segundo, California.
Daina Bouquin: They go there to perform a ritual.
Daina Bouquin: If you were to dream up a ritual to protect the global internet, you might imagine a sci-fi fortress, an unassailable tower with an arsenal.
Daina Bouquin: But the reality is much stranger.
Daina Bouquin: It is a bureaucratic fever dream pieced together from mathematics, paranoia, and plastic.
Daina Bouquin: Imagine walking into the El Segundo facility.
Daina Bouquin: The walls are beige and unremarkable.
Daina Bouquin: You hand over your government ID.
Daina Bouquin: Your bag is searched and you are given a badge.
Daina Bouquin: Then you enter a man trap.
Daina Bouquin: It's a small room with doors at both ends.
Daina Bouquin: Only one door can open at a time.
Daina Bouquin: To get through, you need a pin, a card, and your hand.
Daina Bouquin: To exit, you need them again.
Daina Bouquin: Now you wait in a sterile space where lunch is being served.
Daina Bouquin: It looks like a doctor's waiting room.
Daina Bouquin: But it has an Atari arcade machine.
Daina Bouquin: The people who designed this ceremony actually wrote a 5% "dishonesty rate" into its mathematical specifications.
Daina Bouquin: There are over 100 highly scripted actions, and the entire system is built on the assumption that someone in this room is secretly a traitor.
Daina Bouquin: When it's time, the ceremony begins.
Daina Bouquin: There are no passwords exchanged at the door, no challenges called out into the air.
Daina Bouquin: It's more like a heist movie run in reverse.
Daina Bouquin: To enter the hallway, a staff member swipes an access card and presses their palm against a scanner.
Daina Bouquin: To enter the main room, they lean into the red glow of a retina scanner.
Daina Bouquin: When the heavy door clicks shut behind you, you are standing inside a Faraday cage, an enclosure that shields its interior from external electric fields and electromagnetic radiation.
Daina Bouquin: The entire room is completely signal proof.
Daina Bouquin: Nothing can enter or leave.
Daina Bouquin: Inside this room, there is a large metal cage containing two heavy safes.
Daina Bouquin: Once the safe controllers are brought in, the steel door of the first safe is pulled open.
Daina Bouquin: Inside are safe deposit boxes, each requiring two physical metal keys to be turned at the exact same time.
Daina Bouquin: Inside the box is a smart card.
Daina Bouquin: It rests in a hard plastic case, sealed inside a tamper evident bag.
Daina Bouquin: The plastic case was added to the ceremony.
Daina Bouquin: After someone realized that a phantom thief could theoretically slip a microscopic needle through the plastic bag to manipulate the card without leaving a tear.
Daina Bouquin: The second safe is opened next.
Daina Bouquin: Inside is the master lockbox.
Daina Bouquin: It is designed to self-destruct.
Daina Bouquin: If someone tries to cut it, freeze it, heat it, or even shake it too hard, it will instantly wipe its own memory.
Daina Bouquin: Next to it is a laptop.
Daina Bouquin: This laptop has no hard drive.
Daina Bouquin: It has no battery.
Daina Bouquin: It has no memory of its own.
Daina Bouquin: It's completely air gapped, ensuring the master key can never ever touch the internet.
Daina Bouquin: It doesn't even have a tiny backup battery to keep its internal clock running.
Daina Bouquin: When it's plugged into the wall, the time has to be set manually using an isolated drifting wall clock that has been hanging in the room for over a decade.
Daina Bouquin: The ceremony script actually refers to this clock as the quote, "reasonably accurate clock visible to all in Tier 4 (Key Ceremony Room)".
Daina Bouquin: These are hyper serious security measures that border on hallucination.
Daina Bouquin: But because they're performed by humans, they're imperfect.
Daina Bouquin: During a ceremony in 2014, a security controller accidentally slammed the door of the safe too hard.
Daina Bouquin: It triggered a seismic sensor, which immediately triggered the automatic door locks.
Daina Bouquin: The administrators and the key holders were suddenly trapped inside the metal cage.
Daina Bouquin: They stood there in quiet panic for six minutes until someone finally triggered an evacuation alarm.
Daina Bouquin: The sirens blared and everyone piled into the hallway.
Daina Bouquin: They ate Oreos and Cheez-Its until the system reset.
Daina Bouquin: In 2020, the sophisticated lock on one of the safes simply broke.
Daina Bouquin: A certified locksmith had to be called in, and the people holding the keys to the internet had to sit around for over 20 hours while a guy with a drill tried to bust open the door.
Daina Bouquin: There are also backup key holders.
Daina Bouquin: People entrusted with smart cards containing a fragment of code needed to rebuild the key generating machine from scratch in case something calamitous happens.
Daina Bouquin: Once a year, these people take a photograph of themselves holding their key next to that day's newspaper, just to confirm that all is well.
Daina Bouquin: The room also needs to be kept clean, but cleaners aren't allowed inside.
Daina Bouquin: Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder was known for meticulously vacuuming the room with a $20 dustbuster.
Daina Bouquin: After the room is clean and the cage is unlocked, everything is laid out on a table.
Daina Bouquin: Cameras are recording.
Daina Bouquin: The encrypted requests are loaded via a USB drive.
Daina Bouquin: The smart cards are inserted.
Daina Bouquin: This process takes time.
Daina Bouquin: In all, the ceremony usually takes roughly four to five hours.
Daina Bouquin: But then it's time for the final command.
Daina Bouquin: The Ceremony Administrator types a single letter.
Daina Bouquin: Y for yes.
Daina Bouquin: With that single keystroke, the dramatic portion of the ceremony ends.
Daina Bouquin: The root of the internet is cryptographically signed.
Daina Bouquin: The directory is authenticated.
Daina Bouquin: And the digital world is secured for a few more months.
Daina Bouquin: The logs are printed.
Daina Bouquin: The smart cards are sealed back into new tamper-evident bags.
Daina Bouquin: The heavy safes clang shut and are locked.
Daina Bouquin: And the crypto officers scatter back across the globe, returning to their normal lives.
Daina Bouquin: We like to think the internet is a machine.
Daina Bouquin: An indestructible web built on software, mathematics, and fiber optic cables.
Daina Bouquin: But it isn't.
Daina Bouquin: It is a fragile thing held together by strangers.
Daina Bouquin: Strangers who pack their bags four times a year, who fly across oceans to sit in a windowless room, who submit their eyes to scanners, and turn metal keys in unison.
Daina Bouquin: They don't do it because the code requires an audience.
Daina Bouquin: They do it because we do.
Daina Bouquin: Because we need to know that someone is out there in the dark, calling out the passwords and making sure the gates are locked until morning.
Daina Bouquin: I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Lore in the Machine.