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They were in the Smoky Mountains at their favorite bed-and-breakfast.
Born with an eidetic memory and a love of languages, he’d mastered six Asian dialects as well as Spanish, French, and Italian.
“They’re called the National Security Agency,”
“They’re called the National Security Agency,” Becker said, calling a few of his colleagues for background.
The reply was always the same. “You mean the National Security Council?”
Becker checked the message. “No. They said Agency. The NSA.”
“Never heard of ’em.”
“NSA,” his buddy joked, “stands for ‘No Such Agency.’”
After passing through endless security checks and being issued a six-hour, holographic guest pass, he was escorted to a plush research facility where he was told he would spend the afternoon providing “blind support” to the Cryptography Division—an elite group of mathematical brainiacs known as the code-breakers.
The scrambled text was a code—a “ciphertext”—groups of numbers and letters representing encrypted words.
Eventually one of them explained what Becker had already surmised. The scrambled text was a code—a “ciphertext”—groups of numbers and letters representing encrypted words. The cryptographers’ job was to study the code and extract from it the original message, or “cleartext.” The NSA had called Becker because they suspected the original message was written in Mandarin Chinese; he was to translate the symbols as the cryptographers decrypted them.
Eager to help, Becker pointed out that all the characters they’d shown him had a common trait—they were also part of the Kanji language.
The cryptographers were duly impressed, but nonetheless, they still made Becker work on the characters out of sequence. “It’s for your own safety,” Morante said. “This way, you won’t know what you’re translating.”
Everyone in cryptography knew about the NSA; it was home to the best cryptographic minds on the planet.
Founded by President Truman at 12:01 A.M. on November 4, 1952, the NSA had been the most clandestine intelligence agency in the world for almost fifty years. The NSA’s seven-page inception doctrine laid out a very concise agenda: to protect U.S. government communications and to intercept the communications of foreign powers.
“Codes,” Becker said, fascinated. “How do you know where to start? I mean… how do you break them?” Susan smiled. “You of all people should know. It’s like studying a foreign language. At first the text looks like gibberish, but as you learn the rules defining its structure, you can start to extract meaning.”
Caesar, she explained, was the first code-writer in history. When his foot-messengers started getting ambushed and his secret communiqués stolen, he devised a rudimentary way to encrypt his directives. He rearranged the text of his messages such that the correspondence looked senseless. Of course, it was not. Each message always had a letter-count that was a perfect square—sixteen, twenty-five, one hundred—depending on how much Caesar needed to say. He secretly informed his officers that when a random message arrived, they should transcribe the text into a square grid. If they did, and read
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This was TRANSLTR, the single most expensive piece of computing equipment in the world—a machine the NSA swore did not exist.
This was TRANSLTR, the single most expensive piece of computing equipment in the world—a machine the NSA swore did not exist.
Like an iceberg, the machine hid 90 percent of its mass and power deep beneath the surface. Its secret was locked in a ceramic silo that went six stories straight down—a rocketlike hull surrounded by a winding maze of catwalks, cables, and hissing exhaust from the freon cooling system. The power generators at the bottom droned in a perpetual low-frequency hum that gave the acoustics in Crypto a dead, ghostlike quality.
TRANSLTR, like all great technological advancements, had been a child of necessity.
TRANSLTR, like all great technological advancements, had been a child of necessity. During the 1980s, the NSA witnessed a revolution in telecommunications that would change the world of intelligence reconnaissance forever—public access to the Internet. More specifically, the arrival of E-mail.
Criminals, terrorists, and spies had grown tired of having their phones tapped and immediately embraced this new means of global communication. E-mail had the security of conventional mail and the speed of the telephone. Since the transfers traveled through underground fiber-optic lines and were never transmitted into the airwaves, they were entirely intercept-proof—at least that was the perception.
In reality, intercepting E-mail as it zipped across the Internet was child’s play for the NSA’s techno-gurus. The Internet was not the new home computer revelation that most believed. It had been created by the Department of Defense three decades earlier—an enormous network of computers designed to provide secure government communication in the event of nuclear war. The eyes and ears of the NSA were old Internet pros. People conducting illegal business via E-mail quickly learned their secrets were not as private as they’d thought. The FBI, DEA, IRS, and other U.S. law enforcement agencies—aided by the NSA’s staff of wily hackers—enjoyed a tidal wave of arrests and convictions.
Public-key encryption was a concept as simple as it was brilliant.
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.
Everything is possible. The impossible just takes longer.
Five years, half a million man-hours, and $1.9 billion later, the NSA proved it once again.
Five years, half a million man-hours, and $1.9 billion later, the NSA proved it once again. The last of the three million stamp-size processors was hand-soldered in place, the final internal programming was finished, and the ceramic shell was welded shut. TRANSLTR had been born.
Although the secret internal workings of TRANSLTR were the product of many minds and were not fully understood by any one individual, its basic principle was simple: Many hands make light work.
Its three million processors would all work in parallel—counting upward at blinding speed, trying every new permutation as they went. The hope was that even codes with unthinkably colossal passkeys would not be safe from TRANSLTR’s tenacity. This multibillion-dollar masterpiece would use the power of parallel processing as well as some highly classified advances in cleartext assessment to guess pass-keys and break codes. It would derive its power not only from its staggering number of processors but also from new advances in quantum computing—an emerging technology that allowed information to be stored as quantum-mechanical states rather than solely as binary data.
TRANSLTR had just located a sixty-four-character key in a little over ten minutes, almost a million times faster than the two decades it would have taken the NSA’s second-fastest computer.
In the interest of keeping their success a secret, Commander Strathmore immediately leaked information that the project had been a complete failure.
Intelligence gathering had never been easier.
Intelligence gathering had never been easier. Codes intercepted by the NSA entered TRANSLTR as totally illegible ciphers and were spit out minutes later as perfectly readable cleartext. No more secrets.
To make their charade of incompetence complete, the NSA lobbied fiercely against all new computer encryption software, insisting it crippled them and made it impossible for lawmakers to catch and prosecute the criminals. Civil rights groups rejoiced, insisting the NSA shouldn’t be reading their mail anyway. Encryption software kept rolling off the presses. The NSA had lost the battle—exactly as it had planned. The entire electronic global community had been fooled … or so it seemed.
the NSA seal—a bald eagle fiercely clutching an ancient skeleton key.
EMPLOYEE CARL AUSTIN TERMINATED FOR INAPPROPRIATE CONDUCT.
One morning during her first year, Susan dropped by the new cryptographers’ lounge to get some paperwork. As she left, she noticed a picture of herself on the bulletin board. She almost fainted in embarrassment. There she was, reclining on a bed and wearing only panties.
As it turned out, one of the cryptographers had digitally scanned a photo from a pornographic magazine and edited Susan’s head onto someone else’s body. The effect had been quite convincing.
Unfortunately for the cryptographer responsible, Commander Strathmore did not find the stunt even remotely amusing. Two hours later, a landmark memo went out:
EMPLOYEE CARL AUSTIN
TERMINATED FOR INAPPROPRIATE CONDUCT.
From that day on, nobody messed with her; Susan Fletcher was Commander Strathmore’s golden girl.
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Strathmore loved his country. He was known to his colleagues as a patriot and a visionary … a decent man in a world of lies.
Director Leland Fontaine, the mythical overlord of the Puzzle Palace—never seen, occasionally heard, and eternally feared.
Not even the President of the United States dared challenge Fontaine the way Strathmore did.
Not even the President of the United States dared challenge Fontaine the way Strathmore did. One needed political immunity to do that—or, in Strathmore’s case, political indifference.
“This code that TRANSLTR’s working on—it’s unique. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”
“This code that TRANSLTR’s working on—it’s unique. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.” Strathmore paused, as if the words were hard for him to say. “This code is unbreakable.”
“This code is the product of a brand-new encryption algorithm—one we’ve never seen before.”
The notion of a rotating cleartext function was first put forth in an obscure, 1987 paper by a Hungarian mathematician, Josef Harne.
The notion of a rotating cleartext function was first put forth in an obscure, 1987 paper by a Hungarian mathematician, Josef Harne. Because brute-force computers broke codes by examining cleartext for identifiable word patterns, Harne proposed an encryption algorithm that, in addition to encrypting, shifted decrypted cleartext over a time variant. In theory, the perpetual mutation would ensure that the attacking computer would never locate recognizable word patterns and thus never know when it had found the proper key. The concept was somewhat like the idea of colonizing Mars—fathomable on an intellectual level, but, at present, well beyond human ability.
“He worked on the TRANSLTR project. He broke the rules. Almost caused an intelligence nightmare. I deported him.”
Although Ensei Tankado was not alive during the Second World War, he carefully studied everything about it—
Although Ensei Tankado was not alive during the Second World War, he carefully studied everything about it—particularly about its culminating event, the blast in which 100,000 of his countrymen were incinerated by an atomic bomb.
Moral integrity was of paramount importance to him. It was for this reason that his dismissal from the NSA and subsequent deportation had been such a shock.
“We all have a right to keep secrets,” he’d said. “Someday I’ll see to it we can.”
Ensei Tankado wrote a program that creates unbreakable codes!
“Digital Fortress,” Strathmore said. “That’s what he’s calling it. It’s the ultimate counterintelligence weapon.
He ordered me to go public and tell the world we have TRANSLTR. He said if we admitted we can read public E-mail, he would destroy Digital Fortress.”
Biggleman’s Safe was a hypothetical cryptography scenario in which a safe builder wrote blueprints for an unbreakable safe. He wanted to keep the blueprints a secret, so he built the safe and locked the blueprints inside.
“Right now every software company in Japan has downloaded an encrypted copy of Digital Fortress and is trying to crack it open. Every second they can’t, the bidding price climbs.”
An algorithm that resists brute force will never become obsolete, no matter how powerful code-breaking computers get. It could become a world standard overnight.”
Tankado would give his pass-key to the highest bidder, and that company would unlock the Digital Fortress file. Then it probably would embed the algorithm in a tamper-proof chip, and within five years every computer would come preloaded with a Digital Fortress chip.
Tankado gave a copy of his pass-key to an anonymous third party … in case anything happened.”
“Worse. Anyone hits Tankado, and his partner publishes.”
Of course, Susan marveled. A guardian angel. “And I suppose if anything happens to Tankado, the mystery man sells the key?”
Anyone hits Tankado, and his partner publishes.”
Susan looked confused. “His partner publishes the key?”
Strathmore nodded. “Posts it on the Internet, puts it in newspapers, on billboards. In effect, he gives it away.”
Susan’s eyes widened. “Free downloads?”
“Exactly. Tankado figured if he was dead, he wouldn’t need the money—why not give the world a little farewell gift?”
As a precaution, every file entering TRANSLTR had to pass through what was known as Gauntlet—
As a precaution, every file entering TRANSLTR had to pass through what was known as Gauntlet—a series of powerful circuit-level gateways, packet filters, and disinfectant programs that scanned inbound files for computer viruses and potentially dangerous subroutines.
Computer viruses were as varied as bacterial viruses. Like their physiological counterparts, computer viruses had one goal—to attach themselves to a host system and replicate.
“I’ve got to find the partner before he finds out Tankado’s dead. That’s why I called you in. I need your help.”
Strathmore was a brilliant cryptographic programmer, but his repertoire was limited primarily to algorithmic work; the nuts and bolts of less lofty “secular” programming often escaped him.
He had sent her fiancé—a teacher—on an NSA mission and then failed to notify the director about the biggest crisis in the history of the organization.
“The Seville sun can be cruel.
“We’re missing something.”
He was blessed with myouri—good fortune.
“I have a copy of the Digital Fortress pass-key,” the American accent had said. “Would you like to buy it?”
