"Public key encryption was a concept as simple as it was
brilliant. It consisted of easy-to-use home-computer software
that scrambled personal E-mail messages in such a way that they
were totally unreadable. A user could write a letter and run it
through the encryption software, and the text would come out the
other side looking like random nonsense - totally illegible - a
code. Anyone intercepting the transmission found only an
unreadable garble on the screen. The only way to unscramble the
message was to enter the sender's `pass-key' - a secret series of
characters that functioned much like a PIN number at an automatic
teller. The pass-keys were generally quite long and complex; they
carried all the information necessary to instruct the encryption
algorithm exactly what mathematical operations to follow to
re-create the original message."
"By the 1990s, pass keys were over fifty characters long and
employed the full 256[sic]-character ASCII alphabet".
"An unbreakable code is a mathematical impossibility."
Those are *some* of the more embarrassing extracts from Dan
Brown's "Digital Fortress". The man does not understand public
key cryptography; he does not understand the one time pad; and he
doesn't even know that ASCII is a seven-bit code. These are
specific criticisms that I am prepared to defend on technical
grounds if need be. (They are not his only errors, either.)
I think Dan Brown bit off more than he could chew when venturing
into the crypto world, an opinion that I can certainly justify if
need be.
En passant, from what little I recall of Tom Clancy's forays into
the crypto world, he was less than perfect but considerably less
error-prone than Dan Brown.
But as one wide-lapeled gentleman was heard saying to another in
the back row of the Odeon, "that's not how you rob a bank". As a
***story-teller***, I found Dan Brown perfectly acceptable. It's
just a shame that he screwed up the technical side so badly.