We Ae Watching You...

hi CSE Bloggers... This Technical Thriller Treat(4Ts) is for you...
Digital Fortress, a techno-thriller novel by Da-vinci code fame "Dan Brown". The American wrote the novel and released it in 1998 through St.Martin's Press. The book has got the International Standards Book Number : ISBN 0-312-26312-0
This book deals with issues of civil rights, privacy from your government and the right to privacy in the internet. There are many discussions in the book concerning whether or not having access to everyone's information in order to secure their safety is ethical.
The novel is based on the history of cryptography. In 1976 the Data Encryption Standard (DES) was approved with a 56-bit key rather than the 64-bit key originally proposed. It was widely reckoned that the National Security Agency(NSA) had pushed through this reduction in security on the assumption that it could crack codes before anyone else.In fact the DES was first publicly broken in 1997, 96 days after the first of the DES Challenges. In 1998, the same year as Digital Fortress was published, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (featured in the book) built a piece of hardware costing less than $250,000 called the EFF DES cracker which broke it in 56 hours.
Susan Fletcher, a brilliant mathematician and head of the National Security Agency's (NSA's) cryptography division, finds herself faced with an unbreakable code named "Digital Fortress", that TRANSLTR cannot break. TRANSLTR is the NSA's 3 million processor supercomputer that can crack encrypted data using the brute force method in a short amount of time, with some codes broken in more than 3 hours, others within minutes. The code of "Digital Fortress" 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 posts a copy of Digital Fortress on his website, encrypted with itself. Tankado auctions the passkey to unlock 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.
The brute force search used by TRANSLTR is a search algorithm that takes twice time as long for each extra bit added to the key, so the reaxn of the industry has understandably been to lengthen the key. The Advanced Encryption Standard established in 2001 uses 128, 192 or 256 bits, which take at least 10^21 times as long to solve the code by this technique.
THe solution is 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 and the resulting text is WECGEWHYAAIORTNU. this is arranged in a method called "ceaser square", a columnar transposition cipher code as this... W E C G
E W H Y
A A I O
R T N U the code is read top down and by adding white spaces at right places the code can be generated and the Solution to break the code is "We Are Watching You". V.Srinivasan