The Computers of Star Trek (10 page)

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 who believe in Moore's Law, this means that the DES-cracking machine will cost $110,000 in five years, and it might crack the key in two days. Further, in the landmark
The Electronic Privacy Papers
, coauthored by Mr. Schneier and David Banisar, it's noted that “Within a few years, experts anticipate that DES will no longer be secure from even low-level attacks.”
⁴

Another symmetric technique is triple DES, which inputs three 56-bit keys to an array of three DES chips. Triple-DES is supposedly too slow for various applications. Then there's IDEA, which uses a 128-bit key on 64-bit blocks of data.

In January of 1997, hoping to replace DES, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) asked for a new Advanced
Encryption Standard (AES). In June of 1998, fifteen encryption algorithms were submitted for review. At the time of the millenium—scheduled for January of 2000—the final AES will be chosen to replace DES.
⁵

One of the really cool things about the AES contest is that three of the submissions have already been cracked.

It's amusing to note the names of the encryption techniques, as reported by Mr. Schneier (his comments are in quotes):
⁶

We mention RC6, so we should also mention its predecessors. All come from RSA, which is not only the name of Ron Rivest's company but also the name of yet another encryption technique.
RC, in the wonderful world of computer acronyms, stands for Ron's Code. It also stands for Rivest Cipher. RCI, missing from the list, was a design that flopped. RC3, also missing, was cracked before it was released. RC2 uses a variable-length key on a 64-bit block of data. RC4 is the same as RC2, except the former is a stream cipher (operates on the plaintext one bit or one byte at a time) rather than a block cipher (operates on the plaintext in blocks of data). RC5 permits you to change the block size, key length, and the number of iterations used for encryption. The RC algorithms are all symmetric encryption techniques.

RSA, on the other hand, is an asymmetric technique, also known as a public key approach. This means that the encryption key differs from the decryption key—often called the private key. RSA multiplies two huge prime numbers to obtain its decryption key. Factoring the key using today's computers could require several billion years.

PGP combines IDEA for encryption, RSA for key management and digital signatures, and MD5 for hashing functions.

So what is MD5? There are more encryption techniques than fleas on a dog. Before MD5, we had MD2 and MD4. All were created by Ron Rivest of RSA, Ron Rivest's company. And even if we told you about MD5 and hashing, you still wouldn't know about Blowfish and Twofish. Or Panama.

In the not-so-distant future, it's hypothetically possible that a digitally encrypted transmission could be further encrypted with the fingerprint of the receiver. Thus, only the specific person being sent the message would be able to read it. But if this technique becomes common, hackers will quickly develop methods to duplicate fingerprints—

Hey, haven't criminals done that already?

Only when biometrics reach the level of nanotech will we see real biometric encryption—in three or four hundred years.

In
Star Trek,
messages between starships and their bases, and between crewmembers and their ships, are encrypted before transmission. The coding technique is never mentioned. The encryption algorithm is no doubt far more advanced than today's methods. Still, the
Trek
encryption codes are clearly imperfect. The self-destruct code on two versions of the
Enterprise
rely on voice recognition, surely not a very secure encryption technique (as demonstrated by Data in several instances). The Borg, as evidenced by Seven-of-Nine, have little trouble breaking Voyager's encryption codes (“Scorpion” and all episodes that follow,
VGR
). While the Borg are a unique race, there's no reason to believe that their skill at encryption is unmatched. Garak, on
Deep Space Nine
, often breaks Cardassian encrypted messages for the Federation. Arturis, a member of Species 116 (“Hope and Fear,”
VGR
) is shown as adept or even more talented at breaking codes (including those of the Federation) than the Borg.

How best to manage these security problems? Present-day hackers have proven again and again that no program, however sophisticated, is invulnerable to attack, that no code is unbreakable. It's difficult to believe that this situation will change over the next few centuries. We suspect three hundred years from now the methods might change somewhat, but that the problems of security will remain the same.

When Captain Picard, on the bridge of the
Enterprise
, receives an emergency message from the Federation science station on Ventax II (in “Devil's Due,” TNG), he immediately instructs Wesley Crusher to lay in a course for that planet at maximum warp. Wesley pushes a few buttons, and Picard tells him to “engage.” Off they go.

What exactly is Wesley doing? The ship's computer handles all of the calculations involved in plotting the course, laying in the coordinates, and setting the starship into motion. At best, Wesley just punches in the name of their destination, like a counter attendant at Burger King, and the computer does the rest. There's no actual reason for the captain to do anything more than speak, other than that it may satisfy Starfleet regulations. The helmsman and pilot on Federation starships serve no purpose aside from tradition.

Any meaningful discussion of space navigation requires acknowledging two facts:

Size and speed are the reasons the ship's computer handles interstellar navigation. Because space is so vast and light travels so fast, we need pinpoint accuracy traveling through the void. Close isn't good enough when we're talking about warp drive shooting our ship at many times faster than 300,000 kilometers per second. The smallest mistake could plunge a starship into a nearby sun—or far more likely, send it hurtling billions of miles beyond our destination. Navigation in outer space requires precision impossible to achieve other than with computer-generated exactness.

Yet ship captains have managed to steer their vessels across Earth's oceans from one port to another with reasonable accuracy for hundreds of years—without the benefit of computers. Ocean of water, ocean of stars, what's the difference?

Obviously, the size of the ocean.

Outer space is so incredibly vast, so immense, it's difficult to express distance in a manner that makes sense.

The Atlantic Ocean is approximately 4,025 kilometers wide. Let's say we are flying in a straight path across the Earth's surface (a curved line known as a geodesic, since our world is a globe) from point A in London to point B in New York City. If for every kilometer we travel, we deviate off our path by one millimeter (1/1,000,000 of a kilometer), we'd end up in New York City approximately 4 meters from our destination. That's quite acceptable for such a trip.

Now, let's travel from point A in London to point C on an imagined planet in the Alpha Centauri star system, 4.3 light years away. Given that a light year is 9.46 X 10
¹²
kilometers, 4.3 light years is approximately 40 X 10
¹²
kilometers. If we deviate off course by that same millimeter for every kilometer we travel, we'd arrive approximately 40 million kilometers off target.
ⁱ
That's about the distance from Earth to Venus. Or about fifty round trips between the Earth and the Moon.

In interstellar terms, that's not terrible. At normal impulse speed, it would take the
Enterprise
a little less than ten minutes to reach point C. Not bad. But we suspect Captain Picard would find the delay unacceptable. Especially when that serum needs to be delivered.

Let's consider a somewhat more typical trip: a routine mission to a Federation outpost that's four weeks from Earth traveling at Warp 6—approximately 300 times the speed of light. Assuming the same error as before, 1 millimeter off for every kilometer traveled, the
Enterprise
would drop out of warp approximately a billion kilometers from the outpost. Almost the distance from Saturn to the sun: four hours' travel at maximum impulse. Captain Picard surely would not be pleased.

Simply put, the tiniest navigation errors become magnified by the vast distances involved in traveling through the galaxy. Speed and distance are so great that normal degrees of measurement become meaningless.

Yet only rarely do we see helm control explicitly turned over to the computer. Consider the
Deep Space Nine
episode “A Time to Stand.” Sisko and his crew guide a stolen Jem'Hadar starship to a
Dominion storage facility. The plan is to blow up the base, disrupting Dominion war activities. Sisko and friends manage to plant a bomb on the base. That's when Chief O'Brien warns that the explosion will destroy everything within a radius of 800 kilometers. Unfortunately, as the ship prepares to go to warp speed, the base raises its security shield, trapping them close to the asteroid surface.

The only way for them to escape, the Captain realizes, is to be traveling directly at the security barrier when the bomb blows up the base and takes out the shield's power generator. Using the computer, Dax calculates they must accelerate to impulse speed exactly 1.3 seconds before the blast. Sisko turns piloting controls of the ship over to the main computer to ensure perfect timing. It's a rare admission by the Captain that sometimes human reflexes aren't accurate enough for interstellar navigation.

Too bad the details as stated by the crew don't make any sense. The barrier around the base obviously is less than 800 kilometers from the asteroid, otherwise Sisko wouldn't be worried about the blast. But impulse speed is 75,000 kilometers per second. Having the computer bring the ship to full impulse 1.3 seconds before the blast would instantly flatten the ship against the forcefield. Better to accelerate at 0.001 seconds before the blast. That's not a problem for a computer that calculates in nanoseconds. But it's quite impossible for human senses and reflexes.

The history of
Star Trek
does offer a possible reason for this massive distrust of computerized space war. An early attempt to test a supercomputer named M-5 as commander of the
Enterprise
in a battle situation resulted in disaster (“The Ultimate Computer,”
TOS).
A hundred years later, when Data created the android, Lal, Starfleet command viewed his work with suspicion, citing the M-5 disaster. They wanted the work stopped.

It's difficult to believe that the
Star Trek
writers could have been so traumatized by the M-5 incident that they halted an entire
field of scientific endeavor. Still, genetic engineering seems to have been outlawed for three hundred years by the Federation (“Doctor Bashir, I Presume,”
DS9)
because of the eugenics experiments of the late twentieth century that resulted in the creation of Khan Noonien Singh. People (like Dr. Bashir's father) are sent to prison for violating these laws, even if done without malice. The universe of
Star Trek
does have its illogical aspects.