Subject: REVIEW: "The Zero Hour", Joseph Finder

From: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan and Trevor" <[email-masked]>
Date: 06 Mar 2000 12:05:18 -0500

The Zero Hour by Joseph Finder
	Review Copyright 2000 Robert M. Slade

This is a thriller, with the standard financier-driven-mad-by-bungled-
US-attempt-to-kidnap-him-leading-to-his-wife's-death-bent-on-revenge-
by-destroying-US-financial-system-by-ruining-the-computer-network plot.

Now, Finder seems to have had some pretty high-powered help, given some of
the names in the acknowledgements.  In fact, the book gets an awful lot of
technology right, where most fiction gets it wrong.

There is, for example, some really excellent stuff on bomb forensics.  The
description of recovery of the previous track on a re-recorded tape is
bang on.  The social engineering that goes on, from both sides, is pretty
good, too.  Even bugging technology is more realistic than usual.

But there are still some problems.  The process of tracking down a cell
phone has good points and bad points.  A cell phone can be located by
localizing the tower it is transmitting to, and you can even narrow that
down by measuring signal strength between towers.  But that information is
available more or less immediately, since the cell system has to know
where the phone is in order to place a call to it.  In addition, cell
phones do transmit even when they are not actually on the air.  But not,
as the book seems to indicate, continuously.  Every few minutes a cell
phone broadcasts its presence.  Therefore, the cell system would know
where the phone is pretty much all the time, even if a call had not been
placed.  In fact, the bomber in the story is rather lucky: a cell phone
transmission nearby could very well trigger a complex electronic rig.

Cryptography gets its ups and downs, too.  The story correctly states that
"open" cryptographic algorithms are probably stronger than proprietary
ones.  However, it seriously mistakes the fact that keys are more
important than algorithms.  At one point the bad guys rejoice in the fact
that they have a copy of crypto software, even though the passwords (keys)
have all been changed.  In another place, the size of the key space is
seriously underestimated.  Finder repeats the old saw about the NSA having
all the crypto keys in the world in a database somewhere.  As someone has
pointed out, for even moderately secure keys, the key field address space
contains more addresses than there are hydrogen atoms in the universe, and
even if the NSA could somehow hide extra universes inside black holes
tucked away in pockets of Maryland, the resulting gravitational effects
would probably give the game away.  Also, a book cipher is not a
substitution cipher, it's more of a variation on a one time pad.

Communication, as usual, gets treated particularly badly.  A US-based
pager could not be tested in Europe, since the tower would be just a tad
beyond reach.  Even a satellite pager would be out of the footprint.  If a
pager system did have connections in Europe, you could probably get the
pagers there.  Microwave telecommunications signals between towers are
*all* digital.  It is possible to tap fibre optic cable.  Difficult, but
possible.  A tap on coaxial cable does not need to break the cable: a
simple vampire tap will do, and it's a snap to remove.

There are more, but I'll stop with my favorite topic: viruses.  Marking a
file as hidden would pretty much ensure that it never got executed: it's
not a good way to hide a virus.  Marking a file as hidden would pretty
much ensure that it did *not* get transferred from disk to the computer,
since almost all copy programs copy files rather than disk images.  If
there are millions of copies of the virus everywhere, it's a pretty good
bet that at least one of them has already been executed.  Finally, a PC
virus is pretty much guaranteed not to have any effect on a mainframe.

%A   Joseph Finder
%C   1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019
%D   1996
%G   0-380-72665-3
%I   Avon Books/The Hearst Corporation
%O   +1-800-238-0658 [email-masked]
%P   432 p.
%T   "The Zero Hour"

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