I've just finished yet another portion of "mental floss" (I borrowed this term from Brad, thank you). Dan Brown's "Digital Fortress". Oh, is that floss too thick.
I read "Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Daemons" before and had that feeling that Dan just pours a mishmash of cr.. er.. creative streams onto reader's brain, hoping that s/he will not go down deep into details. As I am not that into art and history I just relaxed and took these bocces as they are. Visible antimatter sure did not look right but hell with it, I am not big afficionado of physics either.
But "Digital Fortress" is a totally different story. IANAPC (I am not a professional cryptographer), but I sure know enough so that my head cracked after reading this endless feed of these crooked lies. There was so much crap, I could not even keep the list in my head. Heres what I remember.
There is no Bergofsky principle. It just cannot be. If key length is greater than message length this encryption is unbreakable. By definition.
64-bit cipher takes around 10 minutes. And million bit cipher takes 3 hours. What???! If we take former statement as true, it will take around 3 hours to crack 68-bit cipher and breaking 128-bit cipher will exceed universe lifetime by several orders of magnitude.
How in the world passive analyzed encrypted text could turn into a worm, or a virus? Theoretically that is possible, but that would mean NSA programmers were really really really talented and succeeded in killing themselves from water pistol, so to say.
Even if we leave crypto, I do not get how a person with an IQ 170 see that NDAKOTA is an anagram of TANKADO. I saw that immediately and read couple of pages several time trying to understand how I managed to miss the fragment where that fact strikes two brilliant cryptoanalitics. If found that fragment closer to the end of the book. Feh, even amateurs would do better.
When I saw the phrase about "difference between elements" I immediately thought about subtraction of chemical elements in periodic table. Brightest NSA minds then spend precious minutes comparing tons of characteristics of nuclear bombs. Whom do I send a resume?
American government spends gazillions of dollars on NSA, yet lets its communications to flow through conventional Internet.
A smartest NSA employee that cracked NSA backdoor in the past does not lock his computer!! It's even less likely than orthodontist not brushing his teeth.
I could go on and on with this list but I am already too bored now.
Well, at least SKIPJACK story is close to reality.
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Submitted by frolov on Thu, 2006-01-05 21:52.
