The Computers of Star Trek by Lois H. Gresh Page A

nobody you know wants to learn PGP and obtain their own keys. One guy doesn’t have time to study the manual, which admittedly, takes a good amount of effort. Another is afraid that his wife will accuse him of sending and receiving adulterous emails if she finds encrypted letters on his computer! There are probably dozens of legitimate reasons why people don’t bother with encryption.
    Personally, we favor strong encryption to protect privacy as much as we can. But this points to the general debate that’s been raging for years about encryption. Some people, like us, think it’s critical to our future security. Other people, like governments, think that encryption will allow bad guys to transmit secret messages about bank heists, murders, and government revolutions. 2

    At the present time, almost any encryption method can be hacked by brute force. This means that a programmer tries all possible key values until he finds the correct one.
    If a key is eight bits long, there are 2 8 or 256 possible keys. Using a programming technique that halves the possibilities and searches only the appropriate branches of a tree for a match, we guess that someone could crack the key after approximately 128 attempts.
    But if an 8-bit key has 2 8 possible keys, then a 64-bit key has 2 64 possible keys and a 128-bit key has 2 128 possible keys. Bruce Schneier, the king of cryptography, says that it would take a supercomputer 585,000 years to find a correct key among 2 64 possibilities and 10 25 years to find it among 2 128 possibilities. 3 He also points out that the universe is 10 10 years old. On the flip side, Mr. Schneier says that most large companies and criminal organizations have the resources to crack a 56-bit key, and that most military budgets suffice to crack a 64-bit key. He predicts that within thirty years, it’ll be possible to break 80-bit keys.
    Within a hundred years, our current technology will be dust. Hardware will change dramatically into DNA, optical, holographic, and/or quantum forms. And software will change to fit its new hosts. Methods of cryptography will change along with the hardware and software. Who knows how long it’ll take a DNA computer, for example, to crack a 128-bit key coded in flesh rather than metal registers? It might be a quick job using a quantum-level computer.
    In the time of Star Trek , nanotech implants in our bodies will dictate entirely new methods of encryption. Possibly a chemical method based on our neurotransmissions. Or an algorithm based on our blood chemistry. Or on our genetic makeup.
    However, the basic cracking technique will remain the same: infiltrate and break the code. Imagine having a computer function infiltrate your body and attack your implanted body network
identity chip. No doubt you’ll have a mechanism to fight the disease of infiltration, much as our blood fights infections today. Tiny nanotech-manufactured devices will scour your bloodstream, find all attacking cracker code, and eat it.
    In summary, today’s encryption methods are not terribly relevant to the world of Star Trek . The use of “fractal encryption algorithms” by Data is absurd. Just more technobabble to make the show sound futuristic and serious.
    For the curious, here’s a brief summary of the state of current encryption technology. For details, we suggest that you study not only Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, but also recent articles in magazines such as Dr . Dobb’s.
    Symmetric encryption means that both the sender and receiver of information use the same secret key. The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is the most famous example of symmetric encryption. DES uses a 56-bit key applied to 64-bit blocks of data. DES is still in widespread use in the banking community. In July of 1998, the Electronic Frontier Foundation at http://www.eff:org reported that it had created a $220,000 computer that could break a DES key in four and a half days. For people