Books - Digital Fortress

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	Books - Digital Fortress

Digital Fortress is a novel written by American author Dan Brown and published in 1998 by St. Martin's Press (ISBN 0312263120).

Plot

Susan Fletcher, a brilliant mathematician and head of the National Security Agency's cryptography division, finds herself faced with an unbreakable code resistant to brute-force attacks by the NSA's 3 million processor supercomputer. The code is written by Japanese cryptographer Ensei Tankado, a sacked employee of the NSA, who is displeased with the agency's intrusion into people's privacy. Tankado auctions the algorithm on his website, threatening that his accomplice, "NDakota", will release the algorithm for free if he dies. Tankado is found dead in Seville, Spain. Fletcher, along with her fiancé, a skilled linguist with eidetic memory, must find a solution to stop the spread of the code.

Main characters

Susan Fletcher: Mathematician, NSA's head cryptographer
David Becker: Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University
Trevor Strathmore: Deputy Director of the NSA, head of Crypto
Ensei Tankado: Ex-NSA cryptographer, author of the virus Digital Fortress
Greg Hale: NSA cryptographer, ex-marine
Leland Fontaine: Director of the NSA
Midge Milken: NSA's Internal security analyst
Hulohot: Assassin hired to hunt down Ensei Tankado and take the ring. After killing Tankado, his new mission was to retrieve the ring before David Becker gets it.
Chad Brinkerhoff: PA of the NSA Director's Office
Phil Chartrukian: NSA Sys-sec
Tokugen Numataka: Japanese businessman, Ensei Tankado's father
Jabba: Anti-Hacker computer expert

Artistic license

The main premise of the book is that there exists a supercomputer that can decrypt any encrypted message through brute force, no matter which algorithm was used to encrypt the message. No exotic cryptographic breakthroughs are mentioned. In reality this is a flawed premise. Some algorithms such as the one time pad are decisively impossible to decrypt through brute force alone. While there are widely used encryption methods that can be defeated through brute force attacks, most of them require decryption systems that have several orders of magnitude more computing power than that described in the novel, if the messages are to be decrypted in such a short timespan. The author also fails to account for exponential increases in difficulty as the key length increases.

It is possible to examine even an executable program without running it; as such, in reality viruses pose no problem to decryption systems, since they will never be running the text being decrypted. Since viruses are one of the key dangers in the book and a major plot point, this forms another major use of artistic license.

The novel states that "Enigma was history’s most famous code-writing machine—the Nazis’ twelve-ton encryption beast." In reality, the Wehrmacht Enigma weighed only around twelve kilograms.

The author has also stated that the ASCII consists of 256 characters, when it actually consists of 128 characters. He also stated that a 64-bit integer would make 64 characters. In reality, it can hold a value from 0 - 18446744073709551615 (2⁶⁴ - 1) or a range of 8 characters. Although ASCII only needs 7 bits per character, in practice an extra bit per character is left unused, so each ASCII character effectively consumes 8 bits.

The book also employs invented and undefined encryption technologies such as "mutation strings." Where real terms are used, they are thrown about without regard for their actual meaning. One section describes public-key encryption as using an agreed-upon key phrase, when in fact the defining feature of public-key systems is that they do not require shared secrets.

Towards the end of the book there is a claim that Fat Man, the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki, contained no plutonium but instead was a uranium-238 bomb. While U-238 was present in Fat Man, it was only used as a tamper with the plutonium providing the main nuclear reaction. Uranium-238 cannot be used alone for fission.

At one point, an underground chamber is described as having a 40-by-30 foot video wall at one end, and having been built by excavating 250 metric tons of earth. Assuming the earth to be of average density, the room would be less than 2 metres long.

Contrary to the book's claim, it is not possible to trace the address to which an email is forwarded once it is sent (at least, not without cooperation from the recipient).

Five-character alphanumeric passwords are not considered secure. While an NSA cryptographer might use a weak password under some circumstances, she certainly would be aware of its weakness, and not be especially surprised if someone broke it.

Once a file has been downloaded, changing the contents of the file at the website will not normally affect any downloaded copies; this makes Strathmore's plan unworkable.

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Books - Digital Fortress

Plot

Main characters

Artistic license

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