Edgefactor

Editors Note: This is a repost of content that appeared on Edgefactor 2.0; it was originally published on April 12, 2004.

Digital Fortress, one of Dan Brown’s earlier works, caught my eye in an airport bookstore on a recent trip. I knew Brown was reasonably adept at spinning a good yarn so I figured it might be a good way to pass the time on the plane. It did serve that purpose fairly well, but Brown’s apparent lack of knowledge on the subject matter he chose to write about prevented me from really enjoying this book.

Published in 1998, Digital Fortress precedes The Da Vinci Code by five years. In those five years it appears that Dan Brown has been able to refine his storytelling style in much the same way that a drug cartel refines cocaine so that it can more readily enter your bloodstream. America seems to be thoroughly addicted to Dan Brown; The Da Vinci Code has spent more than a year on the New York Times Bestseller list for hardcover fiction and only just recently dropped from the number one spot on that list.

I’m sure that anyone without much background in computers or technology would enjoy Digital Fortress immensely. Unfortunately, it seems that people with a background in computers or technology sit squarely in the target demographic for this book.

One of the main foundations of the book is that the NSA has secretly constructed a massive, 3-million processor supercomputer that can use brute-force to decode any encrypted message in minutes if not seconds. This, of course, ignores the fact that as key sizes grow, it takes exponentially longer and longer amounts of time to brute-force check the key space. For instance, a 2048 bit key has about 3.23×10⁶¹⁶ possible values. For sake of comparison, there are around 10²⁴ stars in the universe by our current best estimates. Each additional bit in the key length literally doubles the number of possible keys that have to be checked.

Now it can be safely assumed that the mathematicians at the NSA would probably come up with a better way than brute-force to use a 3-million CPU supercomputer for cracking codes, but Brown doesn’t really deal with that. The book is chock full of instances that clearly reveal Brown didn’t really understand the technologies he was writing about. When you read an author like Neal Stephenson you can easily see how much time and effort went in to researching the book. When you read Dan Brown, you wonder if most of his research was conducted in the children’s section of the library.

The old writer’s cliche is “write what you know.” Keeping this advice in mind, I suggest that Dan Brown’s next book be about a lazy author who has a hard time buckling down and doing his research but becomes fabulously wealthy anyway.

Book Info
Title: Digital Fortress
Author: Dan Brown
Pages: 384
Buy this book at Powell’s

This entry was posted on Monday, September 5th, 2005 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.