Digital Fortress
February 13th, 2007 by Ravenhurst
In Digital Fortress, Dan Brown, the author of Angels & Demons and the Da Vinci Code, takes a stab at the realm of computers and high tech encryption verses our rights as citizens to keep secrets.
Dan Brown has picked a new hero for us to follow — or a couple of them. One of the NSA’s top cryptologists and her boyfriend find themselves in the middle of a political fight between a government trying to prevent secrets from threatening the peace of the United States and a cryptologist trying to protect the rights to privacy of everybody on Earth. An ex-NSA cryptologist is supposed to have developed an encryption called Digital Fortress, a self-mutating string capable of encrypting anything in such a way that no computer anywhere can possible decrypt it.
I thought Dan Brown didn’t know what he was talking about. I thought that maybe he should have done a little more research.
Being somewhat savvy to the realm of computers and encryption algorithms, the plot of the story was not even remotely possible. Now I’m not talking about whether or not the NSA could develop a code-breaking fiend of a computer — which I am sure is possible — but the fact that you could write an encryption program that can change on its own without the benefit of being a program itself is not possible at all. It is, after all, simply a string of characters — letters, numbers, and symbols. It can’t DO anything. It is only used by another program to do things, namely to encrypt. If you want it to DO something, it has to be able to run itself, or be run by something that knows how to interpret it.
But I digress…
I don’t want to spoil the ending for people wanting to read it, but for some reason the top cryptologist in the country could not figure out what I (who do not remotely resemble the top cryptologist in the country) had questioned from the opening chapters of the book. How could a simple string thwart the brute-force encryption prowess of the top code-breaking computer in the world unless it was a program itself or written to be run specifically by that one NSA computer and that one computer alone?
Ok. I won’t blow it for you.
If you want to read it, fine. Go ahead.
I had an easier time believing that you could haul around a tiny bit of anti-matter (Angels & Demons) than believing that a cryptologist was so easily fooled.
It ruined the whole book for me.
Whereas I loved reading his first two books, I wouldn’t waste my time on Digital Fortress.
The running around wasn’t nearly as exciting as the first two books by Dan Brown.
And the conclusion, hundreds of pages later, only made it seem like the top computer minds in the government must have gotten to their positions because their parents bribed the right officials. They certainly didn’t get their because of their intelligence.