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'''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

Plot summary

Code solution

Notes

External links

Plot summary

Susan Fletcher, a brilliant mathematician and head of the National Security Agency's (NSA's) cryptography division, finds herself faced with an unbreakable code resistant to brute-force attacks by the NSA's 3 million processor supercomputer dubbed "TRANSLTR". The code is written by Japanese cryptographer Ensei Tankado, a fired 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" 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.

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:
:W E C G
:E W H Y
:A A I O
:R T N U
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.
His other books use the same "first letter of the chapter" when they give you the little secret hidden codes

Notes

★ One briefly described character is mentioned as an alumnus of Amherst College, which Brown graduated in 1986.

★ At least three episodes of the well known anime series Cowboy Bebop features 'unbreakable' cypher codes. They are 'Bohemian Rhapsody', 'Honky Tonk Woman' and 'Jamming with Edward'. The latter features satellites like the ones in 'Deception Point'.

★ Mr. Brown makes a pretty significant error when describing a climactic chase scene up the Giralda tower of the Cathedral in Sevilla. Though he describes Becker as dashing up the stairs of the Giralda, one of the well-known features of this tower is that it has no stairs leading to the top, but a series of ramps.

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".

★ Criticism in the Spanish-language ''Epoca'' of the book's description of locations in Seville