Digital Fortress
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| Digital Fortress | |
 First edition cover |
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| Author | Dan Brown |
|---|---|
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction Techno-thriller |
| Publisher | St. Martin's Press |
| Publication date | 1998 |
| Media type | print (hardback and paperback) |
| ISBN | 0-312-26312-0 |
| Followed by | Angels & Demons |
Digital Fortress is a techno-thriller novel written by American author Dan Brown and published in 1998 by St. Martin's Press.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
When the NSA's invincible code-breaking machine - encounters a mysterious code it cannot break, the agency calls in its head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant and beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers sends shock waves through the corridors of power. The NSA is being held hostage...not by guns or bombs, but by a code so ingeniously complex that if released it will cripple U.S. intelligence.
[edit] Themes and issues
This book deals with issues of civil rights, the privacy of citizens from their government and the right to privacy on the internet. There are many discussions in the book concerning whether or not it is ethical for a government organization to freely access any information stored electronically by its citizens.
[edit] Real life scenarios
The book is loosely based around recent history of cryptography. In 1976 the Data Encryption Standard (DES) was approved with a 56-bit key rather than the 64-bit key originally proposed. It was widely reckoned that the National Security Agency had pushed through this reduction in security on the assumption that it could crack codes before anyone else.[1]
In fact the DES was first publicly broken in 1997, 96 days after the first of the DES Challenges. In 1998, the same year as Digital Fortress was published, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (featured in the book) built a piece of hardware costing less than $250,000 called the EFF DES cracker which broke it in 56 hours.
The brute force search used by TRANSLTR takes twice as long for each extra bit added to the key (if this is done sensibly), so the reaction of the industry has understandably been to lengthen the key. The Advanced Encryption Standard established in 2001 uses 128, 192 or 256 bits, which take at least 1021 times as long (i.e. 270) to solve by this technique.
Unbreakable codes are not new to the industry. The one-time pad, invented in 1917 and used for the cold-war era Moscow-Washington hotline, was proved to be unconditionally secure by Claude Shannon in 1949 when properly implemented. However it is inconvenient to use in practice.
[edit] External links
- ^ RSA Laboratories. "Has DES been broken?". http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2227.
- Digital Fortress page at Mathematical Fiction Alex Kasman's site includes a forum, critique of the math/computing, and his solution to the code.
- Rob Slade's review of Digital Fortress The book is reviewed "on the basis of technology, including the fiction".
- (Spanish) Criticism in the Spanish-language Epoca of the book's description of locations in Seville
- Matt Crypto lists some errors in the book
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