First edition cover

Author Dan Brown

Country United States
United Kingdom
Language English
Genre Science fiction
Techno-thriller
Publisher St. Martin's Press Transworld
(United Kingdom)
Publication
date
1998
Media type Print (hardback, paperback),
audiobook
ISBN ISBN 0-312-18087-X (first edition
hardcover)
OCLC 55045760 (https://www.worldcat.org
/oclc/55045760)
Digital Fortress
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Digital Fortress is a techno-thriller novel written by
American author Dan Brown and published in 1998 by St.
Martin's Press. The book explores the theme of government
surveillance of electronically stored information on the
private lives of citizens, and the possible civil liberties and
ethical implications using such technology.
1 Synopsis
2 Characters
3 Real life scenarios
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
When the United States National Security Agency's
code-breaking supercomputer (TRANSLTR) encounters a
new and complex codeDigital Fortressthat it cannot
break, Commander Trevor Strathmore calls in Susan
Fletcher, their head cryptographer, to crack it. She discovers
that it was written by Ensei Tankado, a former NSA
employee who became displeased with the NSA's intrusion
into people's private lives. Tankado intends to auction the
code's algorithm on his website and have his partner,
"NDAKOTA", release it for free if he dies. Essentially
holding the NSA hostage, the agency is determined to stop
Digital Fortress from becoming a threat to national security.
When Tankado does indeed die in Seville, of what appears to
be a heart attack, Strathmore asks David Becker (Susan's
fianc) to travel to Seville and recover a ring that Tankado
was wearing when he died. The ring is suspected to have the
code that unlocks Digital Fortress. However, Becker soon
discovers that Tankado gave the ring away immediately
before his death. Each person he questions in the search for the ring is murdered by Hulohot, a mysterious
assassin.
Meanwhile, telephone calls between "North Dakota" and Numataka (chairman of a large computer company in
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Tokyo) reveal that North Dakota hired Hulohot to kill Tankado in order to gain access to the passcode on his
ring and speed up the release of the algorithm. At the NSA, Fletcher's investigation leads her to believe that
Greg Hale, a fellow NSA employee, is North Dakota. Phil Chartrukian, an NSA technician who is unaware of
the Digital Fortress code breaking failure and believes Digital Fortress to be a virus, conducts his own
investigation into whether Strathmore allowed Digital Fortress to bypass Gauntlet (NSA's virus/worm filter).
However, Chartrukian is murdered by being pushed off the catwalk in the sub-levels of TRANSLTR by an
unknown assailant. Since Hale and Strathmore were both in the sub-levels, Fletcher assumes that Hale is the
killer; however, Hale claims that he witnessed Strathmore killing Chartrukian. Chartrukian's fall also damages
TRANSLTR's cooling system.
Hale holds Fletcher and Strathmore hostage to prevent himself from being arrested for the murder. It is then that
Hale explains that the e-mail he supposedly received from Tankado was actually in his inbox because he was
snooping on Strathmore, who was also watching Tankado's e-mail account. After the encounter, Hale's name is
cleared when Fletcher discovers through a tracer that North Dakota and Ensei Tankado are actually the same
person, as "NDAKOTA" is an anagram of "Tankado". Strathmore exposes himself when he fatally shoots Hale,
and arranges it to appear as a suicide. Susan later discovers through Strathmore's pager that he is the one who
hired Hulohot. Becker later kills Hulohot in a violent confrontation.
Chapters told from Strathmore's perspective reveal his motives. By hiring Hulohot to kill Tankado, having
Becker recover his ring, and at the same time arranging for Hulohot to kill him, would facilitate a romantic
relationship with Fletcher, regaining his lost honor, and enable him to unlock Digital Fortress. By making phone
calls to Numataka impersonating as "North Dakota", he thought he could partner with Numataka Corporation to
make a Digital Fortress chip equipped with his own backdoor Trojan so that the NSA can spy on every
computer equipped with these chips. However, Strathmore was unaware that Digital Fortress is actually a
computer worm once unlocked, "eating away" at the NSA databank's security and allowing "any third-grader
with a modem" to look at government secrets. When TRANSLTR overheats, Strathmore commits suicide by
standing next to the machine as it explodes. The worm eventually gets into the database, but soon after Fletcher
figures out the password (3, the difference between the Hiroshima nuclear bomb, Isotope 235, and the Nagasaki
nuclear bomb, isotope 238, a reference to the nuclear bombs that killed his mother and left him crippled), and is
able to terminate the worm before hackers can get any significant data. The NSA allows Becker to return to the
United States, reuniting him with Fletcher. In the epilogue, it is revealed that Numataka is Ensei Tankado's
father. Numataka left Tankado the day he was born since Tankado was a deformed child.
Susan Fletcher The NSA's Head Cryptographer, and the story's lead character
David Becker A Professor of Modern Languages and the fianc of Susan Fletcher
Ensei Tankado The author of Digital Fortress and a disgruntled former NSA employee.
Commander Trevor Strathmore NSA Deputy Director of Operations
Phil Chartrukian Sys-Sec Technician
Greg Hale NSA Cryptographer
Leland Fontaine Director of NSA
"Hulohot" an assassin hired by Strathmore to locate the Passkey
Midge Milken Fontaine's internal security analyst
Chad Brinkerhoff Fontaine's personal assistant
"Jabba" NSA's senior System Security Officer
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Soshi Kuta J abba's head technician and assistant
Tokugen Numataka J apanese Executive attempting to purchase Digital Fortress.
The book is loosely based around recent history of cryptography. In 1976 the Data Encryption Standard (DES)
was approved with a 56-bit key rather than the 64-bit key originally proposed. It was widely believed that the
National Security Agency had pushed through this reduction in security on the assumption that it could crack
codes before anyone else.
[1]
In fact the DES was first publicly broken in 1997, 96 days after the first of the DES Challenges.
[2]
In 1998, the
same year as Digital Fortress was published, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (featured in the book) built a
piece of hardware costing less than $250,000 called the EFF DES cracker which broke it in 56 hours and by
1999 the record was under 24 hours.
[3]
The brute force search used by TRANSLTR takes twice as long for each extra bit added to the key (if this is
done sensibly), so the reaction of the industry has understandably been to lengthen the key. The Advanced
Encryption Standard established in 2001 uses 128, 192 or 256 bits, which take at least 10
21
times as long (i.e.
2
70
) to solve by this technique.
[4]
Unbreakable codes are not new to the industry. The one-time pad, invented in 1917 and used for the cold-war
era Moscow-Washington hotline, was proved to be unconditionally secure by Claude Shannon in 1949 when
properly implemented.
[5]
However it is inconvenient to use in practice and is limited mainly to military and
governments.
[6]
Cryptanalysis
Eavesdropping
Email privacy
NSA call database
^ "Has the DES been broken?" (http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2227). RSA Labs. 1.
^ "Distributed net" (http://www.distributed.net/history.php). Retrieved 2010-06-18. 2.
^ "Record set in cracking 56-bit crypto" (http://news.cnet.com/Record-set-in-cracking-56-bit-crypto
/2100-1017_3-220333.html). CNet. Retrieved 2010-06-18.
3.
^ Schwartz, J ohn (October 3, 2000). "TECHNOLOGY; U.S. Selects a New Encryption Technique"
(http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/03/business/technology-us-selects-a-new-encryption-technique.html). New York
Times. Retrieved 2010-06-18.
4.
^ Shannon, Claude. (1949). Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems. 28(4). Bell System Technical J ournal.
pp. 656715.
5.
Digital Fortress - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fortress
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^ Gary McGraw, J ohn Viega. "Software security for developers: One-time pads" (http://www.ibm.com
/developerworks/library/s-pads.html). IBM. Retrieved 2010-11-02.
6.
Official website (http://www.danbrown.com/digital-fortress/)
Official UK website (http://www.danbrownofficial.co.uk/danbrownbooks_digitalfortress.asp)
(Spanish) Criticism in the Spanish-language Epoca of the book's description of locations in Seville
(http://blogs.periodistadigital.com/periodismo.php/2006/02
/10/ies_dan_brown_un_mentiroso_compulsivo)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Digital_Fortress&oldid=615142436"
Categories: 1998 novels Novels by Dan Brown American science fiction novels Cryptography in fiction
Techno-thriller novels Debut novels Novels about computing St. Martin's Press books
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