Excuse for everything hackable
For referees that play use hacking as an important part of their campaign and having trouble arguing for ‘everything is hackable’ short of quantum computer mumbo jumbo.
This is little bit of Traveller history will explain why anything short of one-time-pads can be defeated by enough hacking effort. It also gives an explanation why the Solomani empire was so short lived.
My idea from this came from a throwaway line by Vernor Vinge in his “A fire upon the deep”, the line was “they don’t know limits of computation” and carries the idea that cultures will eventually discover rules about software stability and security similar to what thermodynamics did to steam engine design.
“Ikara-Grubb postulate or Ikara theorem or Ikara dunaad in Vilani.
In 2055 on Terra the computer scientist Jorgen Grubb conjectured that all asymmetric functions for crypto have an near arbitrary lower bound on simplicity to solve. Prime factoring, elliptic functions, etc, they may all hide tricks that will render them if not trivial so at least much easier to solve.
The conjecture was never rigorously proven but if a proof had been found it would probably render all cryptography based on asymmetric functions obsolete.
The conjecture was largely ignored by just about everyone in the field and was soon forgotten when Terra entered the third millennium and became more and more reliant on public private-keys and asymmetric functions for cryptography.
Arigasha Ikara Gaanimakkur theorem
(Argh! in third Imperium slang, “unless arghed this will keep the channel secure”, “the birth certificate of Norris daughter was arghed so he had to admit creating a clone of himself”)
The brilliant Vilani mathematician Arigasha Ikara Gaanimakkur’s proof that any sufficiently complex assymetric function may have unbounded shortcuts meaning that there might be tricks to vastly decrease the time of brute forcing any crypto based on public private keys and asymmetric functions such as prime factoring, elliptic functions and the like.
The proof showed that no public private key system is potentially better than a security by obscurity, any scheme may prove futile if enough effort is spent in coming up with shortcuts and tricks against it. The most remarkable is that Riga discovered this proof on Vland before Vilani even had computers, in year -10 111 3I, 5 593 BC, hundred years before the first Vilani space travel and several thousand years before the great pyramids of Egypt was built on Terra!
This led the Vilani to rely on one time pads as their primary cryptographically method and relegating asymmetric as stopgaps to simply delay decryption rather than securing it.
Some historians claim that part of the downfall of the Solomani empire rested on the Solomani’s misplaced trust in crypto through assymetric functions aka public private key schemes and eapecially their use of blockchain style schemes for money.
Some conspiracy theoreticians hold that some minor race of the Vilani empire visited earth before contact and made fortunes by spying on the supposedly secure finance communications of earth, this minor race is often described as bearing an uncannily resemblance to ‘the greys’ of Terran folklore.”