The Computers of Star Trek by Lois H. Gresh

century. It’s difficult to believe the threat will have disappeared by the twenty-fourth century. The computer systems of Federation starships and space stations seem extremely vulnerable to the most basic incursions and disruptions. The faith crewmembers and station personnel place in such systems appears to be terribly naive. Too often, major programs such as those involving the replicator, the transporter, and the holodeck crash, causing major disasters.
    A more serious problem was noted in Chapter 2. The three computer cores of the Enterprise are linked by faster-than-light (FTL) transmitters so that they’re always 100 percent redundant. What one computer knows, all three know. That’s fine if, in the
midst of a space battle, the main computer core is hit by phaser fire. The engineering computer core would immediately take control of the ship’s defenses and weapons. Even a few nanoseconds can matter in a fight conducted between ships moving at impulse speeds. Still, that redundancy can be awfully dangerous if the enemy’s using a virus instead of a photon torpedo.
    If the three computer cores are working at FTL speeds and are 100 percent redundant, a virus imported to one core will immediately infect all three. Filters and anti-virus programs offer some degree of protection, but if they can’t protect the ship’s main computer, as they often can’t, how can they protect the backup systems that are set for instantaneous data duplication? Total redundancy would lead to total disaster. Computer viruses are mostly ignored on Star Trek . They shouldn’t be.
    Which brings us to our final topic involving computer security in the twenty-fourth century, the subject that’s the center of any discussion of involving military or government security today—encryption. It’s important now, and there’s no indication that three hundred years from now it still won’t be important.
    Basically, encryption is writing a message in code so it can’t be read by anyone other than its intended recipient. Secret codes have been popular in fiction ever since Poe’s “The Gold Bug” and Conan Doyle’s “The Musgrave Ritual.” Breaking the Nazi code in World War II was an important factor in defeating the Third Reich. While the government and military are prime users of encryption, it’s also used by businesses and industries throughout the world to protect financial information as well as sensitive data. Obviously, the best encryption system is one that can’t be broken by outsiders. Not surprisingly, modern encryption techniques involve computers.
    In simple terms, encryption disguises a message so it can only be understood by someone authorized to read it. The original message, called plaintext, looks like ordinary text. The encryption
process typically uses one or more keys , which are mathematical algorithms that change the plaintext into ciphertext —what looks like garbled numbers, letters, and symbols. After decryption by the authorized reader of the message, the ciphertext returns to its original form, plaintext.
    Encryption, like other methods of computer security, can also open systems to abuse. If you think that you’re transmitting a message that’s totally encrypted, you might send extremely sensitive data across a network. Suppose someone intercepts your encrypted message and hacks the key you used to turn it into ciphertext. Your sensitive data is at the mercy of the wrong people. Think about transactions that typically occur today. Lots of people do online banking. Many people purchase items on the Internet. Many people trade stocks online. A very small number of these transactions are encrypted as they course the phone lines and travel from computer server to computer server along the global net.
    With all the talk about encryption, it’s worthwhile to point out that very few people use it. You may have PGP keys h , but