Saturday, November 2, 2013

Decrypting the Digital Fortress.


Mystery of any sort is enticing in nature, whether in real or reel life. Who is going out with who always forms a great means of guess game for people. The secrets and anonymity always provides an interesting opportunity to ponder and gossip. History has been a witness to the success of various movies and books associated with mystery and thrill. Personally I prefer my mystery served in a book. I cannot imagine any other way in which it can be thoroughly enjoyed. With a book you can actually experience the experience while being mentally transported into the story. Over the years I have enjoyed reading thrillers by Agatha Christie and Sydney Sheldon. My personal favorites are The Return of the Dancing Master by Henning Mankill and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

Dan Brown’s books have substantial amount of controversies associated with them. But with every book of his, you are sure to learn a thing or two. Apart from being handsome, the guy is really smart and that is reflected in the topics he chooses for his books. The books are interesting no doubt but other than that they actually make you sit and Google in detail about stuff – whatever it maybe. Da Vinci code had us googling about the last supper, the Holy Grail, the blue bloodline, Mary Magdalene and the supposed marriage between her and Jesus Christ. Angels and demons had us looking deeply into Rome and Vatican City. I recently laid my hands on The Digital Fortress and once again Google has started to get a lot of hits from my IP.

Digital fortress was published in the year 1998, the year I was promoted in 5th standard and introduced to Enid Blaydon who would soon become my best friend. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that in a parallel world miles apart from my secret sevens and famous fives there was a buzzing of codes and encryption. The book is based on the art of cryptography (art of hiding a secret message in a seemingly inconsequential piece of data) and the means and mechanism involved in decrypting the secret message. My world was still untouched by the advent of internet and what would become a very popular means of communication in those times – the email. Not proud to admit this, but I was familiarized with the concept of cryptography another 11 years later while preparing for my engineering third year seminar, the topic of which I had chosen as Stenography.


 Stenography can be called as the sister of cryptography. It refers to the concealment of messages inside an image, sound file or any other digital media type. Another interesting branch of stenography is network stenography which utilizes the communication protocols and are apparently harder to detect. Whatever maybe the mechanism the methodology of hiding messaging is definitely a boon, especially for the unlawful transactions and elements like warlords, drug dealers and terrorists. It is a common knowledge that the 9/11 attack was planned and executed by hiding the messages in images via Stenography. To counteract this menace our intelligence agencies have to be at least one step ahead. There are various programs and dedicated computers specifically designed to break codes. And these codes are not just any random haphazardly arranged jumbled words. There are specific mathematical algorithms designed to create encoded messages. And these may take a cryptographer or a computer time ranging from few seconds to years to break them. Programs are making use of parallel processing and complex circuitry to come up with something so powerful that will break codes with seconds. On the other hand hackers and other smarties are coming up with codes that are unbreakable. A very interesting chain of actions.

US National Security Agency (NSA) is responsible for snooping stuff of internet and cracking objectionable and suspicious messages. Many a terror attacks and drug deals have been avoided after the NSA alerted the administration and authority. However all the snooping across sensitive data's has been gaining a lot of negative feedback from technology giants. Recently according to reports NSA broke into Google and Yahoo's data centers across the world.After this Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, AOL and Facebook have supported a legislation to clip NSA's wings. It seems the aggressive eavesdropping activity is causing a botheration. What fascinates me is that Mr. Brown has already described in the book published in 1998 is actually happening now!

Though still halfway through the book, the codes, keys and programming description in the book is very fascinating. By the time I am done reading the book, I will have done a more detailed and comprehensive research and analysis on the subject. Any queries or interesting piece of insight related to the topic are welcome.

NOTE: All details related to NSA, the legislation details and the pictures have been taken from various sites on internet and TOI.

Love:
Sepo

P.S While re-reading the post I just realized that the last two paragraphs sound more like a technical paper write-up than a blogpost! Anyhow a little change and something new doesn’t hurt anyone, right?


11 comments:

  1. I personally loved the book, more so given the fact that it was set in 1998 when hacking, encryption and decryption were still in a very nascent stage and had not become the buzzwords they have today.

    Have fun reading the rest of the book.

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    1. Thanks Jairam.
      I did enjoy reading the rest of the book.

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  2. I love the book a lot and it's a brilliant post Sneha. One question: How does it take to crack them and are advocates of freedom and govt protecting a country at logger heads?
    Cheerz

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    1. In today's world they must he doing it through complex machinery something similar to the translator. They have access to huge chunks of data from all major websites we use. A lot of them are fighting and advocating the right to privacy of an individual...

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  3. Well written, good post :)

    Though I have not read 'The Da Vinci Code', I know how popular it had become that even a movie was made on it. I was a keen listener when my friends had discussions on the mystery. Will look forward to read the book someday and watch the movie too.

    Stenography sounds interesting, when it comes to security, I guess the virtual world has more complexities than the real world :)

    I hope you'll review the book once you finish reading it. Take care :)

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    1. Sai, you should definetly read the book if codes, mystery and thrill facinate you. Apart from that you will learn a lot of other interesting stuff from the book.

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    2. Will read it Sneha :) You have an award waiting at Beyond Barriers... please visit and collect it :) I've given 5 fun questions, but the choice is yours - you can either make a post on your blog or answer them in the comments column. Cheers!! :)

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  4. Very informative and nicely explained.

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  5. You know this is the only book of Dan Brown that I haven't yet read. I enjoyed all his other books although after reading Da Vinci code, Angels and Demons seemed a bit too similar. It was still good nonetheless. And yes, you end up googling a lot of things.. thanks to his style of writing and the allure that he creates! Loved Inferno too.. so i guess I should just read this too and get it over with!

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    1. If you ask me even digital fortress is quite similar to da vinci in terms of breaking the secret code, the last minute tension, someone dead with a trace of secrets and mystery around him. But yea a whole new topic and locale make it new and fresh in many ways.

      So all in alk it would be a good idea to read the digital fortress. Also you seem to have missed the Lost Symbol :)

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