About Digital Fortress and Journalists

Journalists are often surprised by their superficiality. They seem to know a lot, but somehow shallow. They are ready to talk about science, about politics, about the plots of the Templars, and in everything there is some kind of hodgepodge, mistakes and absurdities. Here, for example, Dan Brown, is known for his books about historical events, physics and computer technology. And it all looks terribly flat. And sometimes funny. Of course, a writer can invent something that does not happen in life, or it happens, but vice versa. But in a good story, it is always visible and a plot is built around it. For example, in the animated film "Simba" they invented a device that holds gigantic pressure on a small square, due to which they received magical steam technology. And this is an element of fiction, but around the truth. Or Clark's moon dust. They say that there is a lot of dust on the moon and people finally mastered this celestial body. And then - all the truth (to one degree or another). But in Brown’s books you see strange places and obviously this is not the author’s idea. I tried to read the book "Digital Fortress" and write out everything that seemed to me dubious. Those who want to meet and maybe smile, please under the cat. Spoilers are possible.


“The NSA invited Becker because there was a suspicion that the original was written in Mandarin Chinese, and he had to translate the hieroglyphs as they were decrypted.”

Can you write Mandarin in dialect ? I’m not sure that there is a big difference between different types of dialects when writing in hieroglyphs, although I don’t know much about Chinese.
')

"The key, as a rule, was quite long and complex and contained all the necessary information
coding algorithm, using the mathematical operations necessary to recreate the source text ".

I'm not sure that such keys and ciphers should be used. In fact, in our world, the encryption algorithm for most ciphers is not a secret, or is not a complete secret. But in my childhood, after reading the book “Zhangada” by Jules Verne, I became interested in ciphers and really invented a cipher in which I had to indicate in the key information about which encoding techniques are used and in what order.

“The NSA immediately realized that a crisis had arisen. The codes encountered by the agency were no longer ciphers that they solved using a pencil and a piece of paper in a cell — now they were computerized entanglement functions based on chaos theory and using multiple symbolic alphabets to transform the message into an absolutely chaotic character set. ” .

Well, since the second world ciphers do not solve on paper. Actually, even the cipher I mentioned from Jules Verne (Vizineraa cipher) is hardly decrypted manually with a sufficient key length. The Vizhinera cipher was long considered unbreakable, and it was invented in the 17th century.

“Susan looked at him and almost laughed. Impossible? What does this have to mean? There is no such thing as a cipher that can not be cracked: some of them require more time, but any cipher can be opened. There is a mathematical guarantee that sooner or later “TRANSTEXT” will find the necessary password. ”

In fact, mathematics guarantees the existence of unbreakable (theoretically) ciphers. An example known to me is a one-time notebook. But in this case, it may be just the central idea of ​​the book, around which everything is built. There is even a fictional Berghof theorem.

“Susan couldn't help but admire the mind of Tankado. By not opening his algorithm, he proved to the NSA that it cannot be decrypted. ”

If you have not read the book, I will tell. There, the story that the NSA learned how to break all ciphers using the TRANSTEXT supercomputer was happy. But the clever Japanese scientist quarreled with them and decided to create the Digital Fortress cipher, which cannot be cracked. He promised that he would send everyone a program to encrypt with this algorithm, if the NSA did not give up its cunning. Then everything is gone and people can encrypt, and no one can read their messages. But in order to prove that he really has such a cipher, he sent them ... an encrypted file with this cipher. The scientist is clearly killed, but who knows.
Well, imagine, they sent you a file, and your supercar cannot decrypt it, what do you think? I would think that this is just nonsense and there is no text there. And in the book, the heroes should have thought so, because they have a theorem, which proves that any code can be cracked! But they immediately believe the Japanese, not the math!

"Hale understood enough the Limbaugh programming language to know that it is very similar to the C and Pascal languages ​​that were its elements."

Well ... I don’t know how Limbaugh looks like Pascal, I know, only that it is used in the Inferno OS and is very different in its tasks from both C and Pascal. I am also confused by this arrangement in one line of C and Pascal.

"In addition, Susan wrote her beacon in a new hybrid language called LIMBO, so it was not surprising that Strathmore could not cope with it."

The beacon is such a tricky program that somehow finds out where the letter was sent from. If I understand the book correctly, it’s something like a Trojan, but it’s still not clear exactly how it works there and, moreover, they have it in that universe that all Inferno OSs have?

“Now Susan understood why the security officer was so excited. Chain mutation. She knew that a chain mutation is a programming sequence that distorts data in the hardest way. This is a common phenomenon for computer viruses, especially those that infect large blocks of information. ”

I heard something about polymorphic viruses. Could this be what Brown had in mind? However, the phrase is still full of fog.

“Under normal conditions, such an action would be considered unacceptable. But in the current situation there was no danger in downloading this program to TRANSTEXT, because the commander knew exactly what the file was and where it came from. ”

I explain, they sent an unknown file (the person with whom they quarreled), and they downloaded it into their super-secret system, where, in addition, superimportant data is stored. Well done.

“- If I received the key, I could break into our copy of the“ Digital Fortress ”and make the necessary changes ...”

There is such a moment. The scientist puts his unbreakable "Digital Fortress" on the site, and the NSA then plans to replace it with his hackable version. But ... the fact is that "Digital Fortress" was encrypted with "Digital Fortress". This was, in fact, the unbreakable file, which they wanted to crack, but could not.

“She remembered her first reaction to the story of Strathmore about the algorithm, which is not susceptible to hacking. Susan was convinced that this was impossible. The threatening potential of this whole situation has suppressed it. What kind of evidence do they have that Tankado really created the “Digital Fortress”? Only his own statements in e-mails. ”

They thought of this!
And then the spoiler!

“The file that Tankado posted on the Internet was an encrypted virus, probably embedded in the mass-use encryption algorithm, strong enough that it could not harm anyone — anyone except the NSA. "TRANSTEXT" opened the protective shell and released the virus into the wild. "

I will not comment.

“Susan looked indifferently at TRANSTEXT. She understood that the fireball, sharpened in a ceramic cage, would soon burst out and swallow them. She almost physically felt this ball go up faster and faster, devouring the oxygen released by the burning chips. A little more - and the dome of the encoder will turn into a fiery hell. ”

Without an explosion of unprecedented power, what is this story? Brr ... well, I'm not working in a data center, and the fireball breaks through the floor ...

“Alas, this program has no such vanity, it has no instinct for procreation. She is simple-minded and purposeful, and when she reaches her goal, she will most likely commit digital suicide. - Jabba theatrical gesture pointed to a huge screen. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he sighed heavily again, “in front of you is a computer kamikaze aggressor ... a worm.”

That's just funny. And Jabba is their main computer specialist.

“The director nodded knowingly. The ENIGMA, this twelve-ton monster of the Nazis, was the most famous encryption machine in history. There were also groups of four characters. ”

By the way, I understand that Brown does not know that computer ciphers do not apply to letters of the alphabet, but to ones and zeros.
And finally. Geniuses in computer science and mathematics lead the discussion.

“- What is the difference between isotopes? - asked Fontaine. “It must be something fundamental.”

Have a nice day, everyone.