Archive for 15 October 2004
The secrecy behind encryption
15 October 2004 in Root | Comments (0)
An interesting book to read is the fictional book “Digital Fortress“[affiliate], by Dan Brown, which plays around with encryption, deception, the National Security Agency and love all mixed into one juicy story. As one might guess, the ingredients for a good story is there but I think the book fails to deliver the story in an original way. Sure, the book is ready for Hollywood, but it is of no blockbuster material.
One thing that I did like about the book, is the background work the author had done on encryption and managed to weave it into the story. One of the more interesting semi-facts in the book is how the National Security Agency has managed to play part in creating some encryption algortihms. In the book, the encryption Skipjack was supposedly created to have a backdoor especially made by the NSA to allow them to decrypt the non-critical encrypted emails sent inbetween the government institutions. The backdoor was officially non-existing and very cleverly hidden so that non-NSA mathematicians at that time thought the encryption algorithm was really safe when they analyzed it.