Comment by entropy_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by entropy_ | Hacker News Reader

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I made the mistake of reading Digital Fortress at some point. The entire plot is predicated on the existence of a computer at the NSA that can defeat any encryption through brute force without even knowing the underlying encryption scheme. You give it ciphertext it outputs plaintext. Not satisfied with how ludicrous that is, as in it can be proven impossible by anyone with even a passing familiarity with what encryption is, he also goes into all these actual numbers like it can break 2k long keys in under a second so even using much larger keys it's only a few minutes. Completely ignoring the fact that key spaces grow exponentially with key size and instead assuming it's linear... This is all in the first couple chapters so I'm not even spoiling anything

Researched his books are not... At least that one wasn't, because if he'd consulted even a first year CS student they could've told him it's all wrong.

That whole experience turned me off of Dan Brown books (even though I had previously read Angels and Demons and enjoyed it, knowing his research was so shit in areas I'm knowledgeable in makes it harder to read books about things I'm not because I know I will be coming away with wrong ideas stuck in my head)

A MacGuffin (a.k.a. McGuffin or maguffin) is a term for a motivating element in a story that is used to drive the plot. It serves no further purpose.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacGuffin

Never read the book so not sure how integral the technical details are to the plot. But this sounds like it could be excused as a mere plot device or by appealing to the Suspension of Disbelief.

I agree it would probably be wiser narratively and aesthetically to let our hero, the Cryptographical Expert, gloss over the technical details and just say to the pushy Head Bureacrat at some point early in the novel something like, "I could try to explain this to you but I don't fully understand it myself."

The less pardonable offense where Dan Brown's writing is concerned, both in my limited experience and as others in this thread have pointed out, is the lousy writing.

Dan Brown does a lot of "research", but it is not what we would consider to be research. He is interested in the world of conspiracy theories, in which NSA is a large subject. This is the common thread going through all of his books.

In German we have two words for research.

"Recherche" which is what journalists and authors do, to find information for Articles and Stories.

And

"Forschung" which is what scientists do with experiments.

I often have the feeling English speaking people like to play with the fact that these things are called the same in English.

It is sad and says a lot that in our society journalists, who are responsible for delivering information to the masses, fall in he first category not the latter.

The part that made me put that book down was when he listed a bunch of encryption schemes and one of them was ZIP.

The paragraph in question:

> Now Susan was even more doubtful. Encryption algorithms were just mathematical formulas, recipes for scrambling text into code. Mathematicians and programmers created new algorithms every day. There were hundreds of them on the market-PGP, Diffie-Hellman, ZIP, IDEA, El Gamal. TRANSLTR broke all of their codes every day, no problem. To TRANSLTR all codes looked identical, regardless of which algorithm wrote them.

Thanks for finding this. Once you read a bizarre sentence like that, you begin to suspect that the level of research Brown puts into subjects which you may know less about, such as religious history, to be similarly dismal. I doubt these kinds of books are even a little bit instructive as the article makes out. Rather they leave you knowing less about the world than you did before you started.

However, I couldn't help but read a bit further, where the Achilles Heel of TRANSLTR is identified - 'rotating clear text':

> The notion of a rotating cleartext function was first put forth in an obscure, 1987 paper by a Hungarian mathematician, Josef Harne. Because brute-force computers broke codes by examining cleartext for identifiable word patterns, Harne proposed an encryption algorithm that, in addition to encrypting, shifted decrypted cleartext over a time variant. In theory, the perpetual mutation would ensure that the attacking computer would never locate recognizable word patterns and thus never know when it had found the proper key. The concept was somewhat like the idea of colonizing Mars-fathomable on an intellectual level, but, at present, well beyond human ability.

Of course, neither Harne nor the notion of 'rotating clear text' actually exist!

> Of course, neither Harne nor the notion of 'rotating clear text' actually exist!

Brown's work is full of ass pulls like this. Much of the plot of the book hinges on the "Bergofsky principle", which is, roughly, that "any crypto can be cracked". It's one of those nonce names thrown in to add scientific gravitas -- like "Tannhauser gate". But of course not only was there no Bergofsky and no such principle, but the opposite is the case in our current understanding of cryptographic math: there are some ciphers such as the one time pad which are, in principle, totally uncrackable. (They are also extremely cumbersome to use, and their cumbersomeness makes them prone to attack in other ways, so we make do with "uncrackable for all intents and purposes given current-era hardware").

Of course, when I first read about Satoshi Nakamoto I giggled a bit and thought of Ensei Tankado...

It can probably break ONETIMEPAD, too.

He lost me at the whole Bible code thing. The plot was just too riddled with deus ex, and that is just no fun.

One of his other books opens with a few pages on how anti-matter is the solution to the world's energy crisis due to the amount of energy stored inside it. Totally ignoring the efficiency issues of producing it in the first place.

I'm fine with there being an explicit deviation from reality. "Angels and Demons" has one, spending a few paragraphs about how it explicitly broke conservation of energy. I'm fine with that, as it fits with the theological overtones of the book as a whole.

It's everything else that makes no sense whatsoever.

* A single lone researcher getting beam time on the LHC, without anybody knowing what the experiment was doing. I don't care how brilliant a person is, you're not doing experiments at that scale without having it be approved ahead of time.

* Perfect antimatter containment in large quantities. There's going to be some leakage, resulting in detectable gamma rays.

* Portable antimatter containment. Penning traps require large magnetic and electric fields, not exactly conducive to transportation.

* Countdown on a storage device with no safety margin. I can understand having a countdown to the engineered safe period. I cannot understand having the storage device shut off at exactly that time, rather than continuing to use whatever power it has.

* Inability to track wireless cameras. There is a camera pointed at the hidden antimatter containment device, and no attempt is ever made to track the signal from that camera.

* Failure to use binary search. (This is the only one that doesn't occur within the plot's setup, so avoiding giving spoilers.)

The book meta_AU is talking about is Angels and Demons, and while it doesn't explicitly state that it would solve all the world's energy issues it heavily implies it.

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