Digital Fortress
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| Author | Dan Brown |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction, Techno-thriller novel |
| Publisher | St. Martin's Press |
| Released | 1998 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-312-26312-0 |
Digital Fortress is a novel by American author Dan Brown and published in 1998 by St. Martin's Press (ISBN 0-312-26312-0).
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
Susan Fletcher, a brilliant mathematician and head of the National Security Agency's cryptography division, finds herself faced with an unbreakable code resistant to brute-force attacks by the NSA's 3 million processor supercomputer. The code is written by Japanese cryptographer Ensei Tankado, a sacked employee of the NSA, who is displeased with the agency's intrusion into people's privacy. Tankado auctions the algorithm on his website, threatening that his accomplice, "North Dakota (e-mail address being NDakota)", will release the algorithm for free if he dies. Tankado is found dead in Seville, Spain. Fletcher, along with her fiancé, David Becker, a skilled linguist with eidetic memory, must find a solution to stop the spread of the code.
[edit] Characters in "Digital Fortress"
- Susan Fletcher: Mathematician, NSA's head cryptographer
- David Becker: Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University and Susan's fiancé
- Commander Trevor Strathmore: Deputy Director of the NSA, head of Crypto
- Ensei Tankado: Japanese ex-NSA cryptographer with a birth defect, creator of Digital Fortress
- Greg Hale: NSA cryptographer, former Marine, murdered by Strathmore
- Megan: Teenager who tragically was murdered by Hulohot just after she had given Tankado's ring to David, and gotten the opportunity to flee the nightmarish Sevilla and go home to New York.
- Leland Fontaine: Director of the NSA
- Midge Milken: NSA's Internal security analyst
- Hulohot: An assassin from Portugal hired to hunt down Ensei Tankado and take the ring. After killing Tankado, his new mission was to retrieve the ring before David Becker gets it.
- Chad Brinkerhoff: PA of the NSA Director's Office
- Phil Chartrukian: NSA Sys-sec
- Tokugen Numataka: Japanese businessman, Ensei Tankado's reluctant father
- "Jabba": Resident Sys-sec Chief, anti-hacker computer expert
- Soshi Kuta: Jabba's assistant
[edit] Code solution
The code that appears in the end of the book
- 128-10-93-85-10-128-98-112-6-6-25-126-39-1-68-78
is decrypted by looking at the first letter of the chapter for each number. For example, chapter 128 starts 'When Susan awoke'. The resulting text is
- WECGEWHYAAIORTNU
Decryption is performed using a columnar transposition cipher, termed a "Caesar Square" cipher in the book (this is unrelated to the Caesar cipher). The letters are arranged into a square:
- WECG
- EWHY
- AAIO
- RTNU
and read from the top down.
- WEAREWATCHINGYOU
Add spaces and you get the plaintext,
- "We are watching you"
a reference to the NSA's monitoring systems.
[edit] Notes
- One briefly described character is mentioned to be from Amherst College (same college from which Dan Brown graduated in 1986)
[edit] External links
- Digital Fortress page at Mathematical Fiction Alex Kasman's site includes a forum, critique of the math/computing, and his solution to the code.
- Rob Slade's review of Digital Fortress The book is reviewed "on the basis of technology, including the fiction".
- (Spanish) Criticism in the Spanish-language Epoca of the book's description of locations in Seville
| Dan Brown books | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Digital Fortress | book | |||
| Angels & Demons | book | film | ||
| Deception Point | book | |||
| The Da Vinci Code | book | film | game | soundtrack |
| The Solomon Key | book | |||
