Dan Brown, the author of the acclaimed ’’The Da Vinci code’’ has written another book of the same quality ’’Digital Fortress’’. Neither of them are superlative in their genre, catering to the adrenaline rushes readers nowadays need from books to keep their attention focused on a single line of thought.
The story starts with Ensei Tankado, a brilliant ex-NSA programmer, dying in Sevilla, Spain of what appears to be a heart attack. In his dying moments he hands a golden ring to one of the witnesses to his death. A professor of linguistics, David Becker who teaches at Georgetown University is sent to Spain by Commander Strathmore, the deputy director of NSA to retrieve this ring.
David’s fiancee, Susan Fletcher is the head of cryptography in the NSA, and like most popular fiction characters she’s inevitably an incredible beauty, a beauty to kill for as the story relates in the closing chapters (like most popular fiction this attribute is very necessary to keep the male readers involved).Susan is summoned by her workaholic boss on a Saturday, citing an ’’emergency’’ as the only reason. Now, if the boss is in love with her, I suppose he will make sure she’s ’’indispensable’’ to his efforts.
Susan finds out that Strathmore has been trying to break a program encrypted with ’’Digital Fortress’’, an encryption algorithm devised by Tankado, with the key for decryption available to the highest bidder. He uses a behemoth of a computer called TRANSLTOR which is supposed to break encryption code in ten minutes, something which would normally take a Cray supercomputer nineteen years to break and is fueled by three million processors, computing in parallel. With ’’Digital Fortress’’ the computer has had no success for the past eighteen hours.
Enter Greg Hale, another programmer who’s entry into the rarified atmosphere of the NSA was by exposing the intentions of the NSA in developing a encryption standard called ’’Stripjack’’. He has a penchant for snooping, fast cars, loud music systems and has the hots for Susan. In addition to that he’s an ex-Marine.
Now I cannot make the connection between the intellectual capabilities of an ex-Marine and an ace programmer, because it is a widely known fact that your intellectual capabilities or lack of it, is a primary qualification for making the Marine Corps. (For all the ex-Marines reading this, I am not saying that you are dumb, I am just relating a cliche).
The plot thickens, when the props enter the stage in the form of a PA, an assassin, an accountant, a security technician and of course a head of a Japanese software company trying to establish world-domination with the new encryption standard.
David stumbles through Spain, Susan randomly spews out some very well known ’’basic’’ facts at us in the form of demonstrating her ’’incredible’’ knowledge of the principles of cryptography and at every other moment seems to run to her ’’sugar-daddy’’, Strathmore when she’s lost. Strathmore puts on a serious facade, while secretly plotting as to how best to confess his love for Susan.
Terms like ’’firewall’’, ’’worm’’, ’’mutation strings’’ are applied randomly in the book to impress the uninitiated and the book touches as much computer security as the movie ’’Hackers’’ or ’’War Games’’.
Finally I find it hard to believe that the top brains at NSA do not know eight-grade chemistry, since the whole solution lies in the difference between the atomic numbers of two isotopes of the world’s most sought after element after gold. Mendeleev must be turning in his grave.
On the whole the book is strictly for entertainment, so if you go in expecting some light on computer security, you will be disappointed. I wouldn’t blame the author, since it is tough to write an entertaining non ’’geek only’’ book on computer security, but he didn’t have to take it to such ludicrous proportions.
If you are really interested in computer security, I would recommend a far more entertaining book by Bruce Schneier titled ’’Secrets and Lies : Digital Security in a Networked World’’.
And as far as the existence of a machine called ’’TRANSLTOR’’goes, quantum computers don’t exist..yet.