Books Review: Digital Fortress

by - December 29, 2016



Deskripsi Singkat Tentang Buku

Judul (edisi Inggris): Digital Fortress
Penulis: Dan Brown
ISBN: 0552151696
Jumlah Halaman: 510
Terbit: February 1st 1998
Penerbit: Corgi Books

Well, its been like almost 1-2 year(s) ago i have completely read this book. It was one of my friend recommendation to me. She said, "you might be loved this Author". And finally I am drawn to all Dan Brown master pieces (and waiting for his next novel in November 2017). Finally, i had myself reading the entire Dan Brown and now i felt like all of those books existence need to be known by others. So here i am, starting to review his first master piece Digital Fortress.

About Dan Brown, (again) citing from goodreads,

"Dan Brown is the author of numerous #1 bestselling novels, including The Da Vinci Code, which has become one of the best selling novels of all time as well as the subject of intellectual debate among readers and scholars. Brown’s novels are published in 52 languages around the world with 200 million copies in print."

Well, lets begin...

Its about Susan Fletcher story. Having a high IQ (170! Could you imagine that?), she is one of greatest woman in National Security Agency division Cryptography). US has National Security Agency and Department of Defense while Indonesia only have Kementerian Pertahanan (which one of division is Security Division).

What is Cryptography after all? nah loh
Well, Cryptography is about how encrypted message could be decrypted. Encrypted messages itself has random characters that have no meaning at all. By decrypting its messages we could figure it out what is the meaning of such a message.

masih bingung juga? wkwk
Jadi gampangnya gini, Kriptografi adalah ilmu tentang bagaimana sandi-sandi atau kode-kode diterjemahkan sehingga menjadi bermakna.
Contohnya saya menulis pesan di enskripsi yakni "FEIRA".
Setelah di decrypting maka kita sadar bahwa FEIRA adalah sebenarnya ARIEF.

Such a branch of knowledge is called Cryptography. At first, they decrypt it manually, after several years when public encryption, million or even billion messages that were encrypted needed to be encrypted by NSA. Following 'something' theorem, that every encrypted message could be broke using brute force. It is just a matter of time, when brute force method is used, to get the message decrypted. Flooded with almost billion encrypted messages everyday, NSA was forced to build something impossible. A universal decryption machine.

The idea of universal decryption machine is to decrypt the messages using brute force method. Yeah it takes time alot, but with using high performance processor, everything are achievable as Bergofsky Principle told. Have you watched film named The Imitation Game? The Imitation Game is documentary film about someone named Alan Turing that built Enigma (universal decryption machine that helped allies won WW II). This universal machine, works like Enigma. In this novel, that machine is called TRANSLTR.

TRANSLTR successfully built. TRANSLTR recognized as a very secret project, everyone that was involved being told that the project was failed. Only several people in Cryptography knew the truth. With using TRANSLTR, there will be no secret messages over the world. Email password could be hacked by seconds while the most longest password within 15 mins.

One day, Ensei Tankado, one of former NSA who worked for TRANSLTR project and know its existence, released codes that make TRANSLTR work almost 15 hours without stop. As i mentioned above, it takes 15 mins to break a hardest password ever exist. Ensei Tankado said that it is a rotation loop algorithm or something name that. It is an algorithm that makes TRANSLTR could not stop guessing password because the computer did not know if it is already guess the password correctly.

bingung ya? maaf susah ngejelasinnya haha
Jadi intinya kan gunanya TRANSLTR buat nebak password, nah TRANSLTR tau passwordnya telah ditebak karena setelah passwordnya dimasukkan kata-kata yang terenskripsinya berubah jadi plain text which is ada di kamus besar bahasa. Nah kalo ini, ketika di tebak ternyata hasil tebakannya bukan plain text namun masih kata-kata acak. Nah meskipun password yang ditebak benar, hasilnya tetap teks acak. Nah ini yang membuat TRANSLTR berpikir kalau password sebenarnya belum tertebak yang padahal mungkin sudah.

The codes were released on Ensei Tankado website encrypted by using the same algorithm. kasarnya kaya nyimpen brankas yang gabisa dijebol menggunakan brankas yang gabisa dijebol juga. Ensei Tankado said that if TRANSLTR existence is not mentioned by NSA then Tankado will release the code that NSA itself cant decrypt. It would be totally disaster, terrorist attacks, and etc could not be predicted. Then what happen next? Read the novel! My personal rating about this novel is 4/5.

You wanna know about privacy in Internet?
You wanna know how we are living in a world which no private messages rules exit?
Then read the novel! Fyi, every technology mentioned by the author are really exist in real world!

Quotes about this book:

Everything is possible. The impossible just takes longer.” 
― Dan BrownDigital Fortress

Who will guard the guards ? If we're the guards of society, then who will watch us and make sure that we're not dangerous?” 

― Dan BrownDigital Fortress

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