From rec.arts.sf.reviews Wed Mar 8 12:12:30 2000 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed2.news.luth.se!luth.se!newsfeed.online.be!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!dreaderd!not-for-mail Sender: wex@deepspace.media.mit.edu From: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan and Trevor" Organization: Vancouver Institute for Research into User Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: REVIEW: "The Zero Hour", Joseph Finder Reply-To: rslade@sprint.ca Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 06 Mar 2000 12:05:18 -0500 Message-ID: X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.5/Emacs 20.3 Lines: 75 NNTP-Posting-Host: deepspace.media.mit.edu X-Trace: dreaderd 952362321 2944 18.85.23.65 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:2631 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 avonweb@hearst.com %P 432 p. %T "The Zero Hour" ====================== (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer) rslade@vcn.bc.ca rslade@sprint.ca slade@victoria.tc.ca p1@canada.com You're just jealous because the voices only talk to me. http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev or http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade