| Susan Fletcher |
Website Links For Digital Fortress |
Information AboutSusan Fletcher |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT DIGITAL FORTRESS | |
| 1998 novels | |
| dan brown | |
| science fiction novels | |
| cryptography books | |
| techno-thriller novels | |
| digital fortress | |
| american novels | |
''Digital Fortress'' is a novel by American author Dan Brown and published in 1998 by St. Martin's Press (ISBN 0-312-26312-0). 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 Attack s 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
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|