So I'm reading Digital Fortress

fly

fly

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Oct 1, 2004
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mattressfish
boy is this book lame... I hate Dan Brown. anyway...

Assuming at worst case, the NSA needs to brute force an encryption scheme. What if the text is double encoded? Say you encrypt a document with Blowfish, then encrypt the output with something simple like DES. Even once the DES is cracked, the document will still look encrypted, so the computer wouldn't even know it cracked it.

Even if rumored 'shortcuts' to certain encryption schemes were true. Even if the shortcut eliminated all but 100 possible keys, the message would still be hidden by another layer. How could that be cracked???

Anyone here have any ideas or input on this?
 
fly said:
...Anyone here have any ideas or input on this?...
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Yes, Dan Brown is a moron.

In order to believe/enjoy any of Dan Brown's books you have to make a few concessions in regards to his grasp of technology, these being:

1) The "government", "illuminati", NSA, NRO, DID, DOD, NSA, CIA, & McD's, and so on are all using modern day tech while the rest of the world is using encryption and tech from 1992.

2) That Dan Brown can even define the words "technology" and "encryption".

Drool-Boy said:
The best way to decrypt files is to find the person that encrypted it and beat the password out of them with a louisville slugger.
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There is more truth here than anywhere else on the internet. What ever happened to the good old days where computer hacking was a huge Russian KGB agent with nothing to use but a syringe of Sodium Pentathol, a black-jack, a good knife, and a cyanide pill in case of capture.
 
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what if there were an algorithm to detect another source of encryption, so let's say that the NSA were to crack the Blowfish coding, but it would also being to recognize a pattern with the cracked code. so let's say that it has scanned and cracked the first 100 characters, and out of that maybe even as little as 10 show up as another recognizable scheme of encryption. the user would be given the option to explore decrypting that as well.

edit: fuck dan brown. neal stephenson ftw.
 
KNYTE said:
Yes, Dan Brown is a moron.

In order to believe/enjoy any of Dan Brown's books you have to make a few concessions in regards to his grasp of technology, these being:

1) The "government", "illuminati", NSA, NRO, DID, DOD, NSA, CIA, & McD's, and so on are all using modern day tech while the rest of the world is using encryption and tech from 1992.

2) That Dan Brown can even define the words "technology" and "encryption".



There is more truth here than anywhere else on the internet. What ever happened to the good old days where computer hacking was a huge Russian KGB agent with nothing to use but a syringe of Sodium Pentathol, a black-jack, a good knife, and a cyanide pill in case of capture.
Click to expand...

QFT Ralph Peters for the intellectual win.
 
b_sinning said:
Cryptonomicon was good on the encryption and math but I was unsatisfied with the end.
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You mean the... "hey look, the book is over." ending? Yeah, that sucked.

Read Snow Crash? Same shit.
 
Snow Crash was more fun, overall. But less... believable? I don't know what word I am looking for there. The stuff in Cryptonomicon was at least mostly based on realistic things. Snow Crash might be possible, inside a video game. :)
 
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