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> It’s a technology movie that still isn’t outdated even though it was released 20 years ago and features cradle modems. This is a great point. I guess it's be

> It’s a technology movie that still isn’t outdated even though it was released 20 years ago and features cradle modems. This is a great point. I guess it's because they kept it realistic. Except for the box itself (of course) and maybe the voice-activated mantrap, there wasn't really any crazy futuristic spy tech. It was all plausible for the time, so it hasn't been invalidated by the actual future.

Avshalom 5y ago
Even then, the box: "an ASIC implementation of a newly discovered crypto attack" complete with a massive white board full of linear algebra is about as good a muggufin as you can ask for in any computer adjacent movie.
- myself248 5y ago
  The only thing I don't love about it is the macguffin-ization itself. An algorithm is an idea and could've been communicated, published, spread around the world in the blink of an eye. Some years ago I wrote down a sketch of a sequel based on this exact idea, but the paper is encrypted and the key is sharded, and much of the plot revolves around trying to convince the trusted people who hold the shards that the researcher is actually dead and they should unseal the document, while the adversary tries to convince otherwise.
  - MPSimmons 5y ago
    I'd read that.
  - deanCommie 5y ago
    In a traditional definition of "algorithm", maybe. But think about a machine learning model or a neural network. The kind of breakthrough that will break RSA might not be describable in a research paper (sure, the science would be, but the science for neural networks took decades before it was able to be applied practically)
KennyBlanken 5y ago
The social engineering in the movie is pretty much the same stuff everyone talked about in DEFCON conferences even a decade or two later...and really, still topical today (phishing.) I think The Box was pretty realistic. It absolutely looks and acts the part of an FPGA type device. Finding a "shortcut" through computationally expensive encryption is plenty realistic (look at all the wifi attacks, for example), and while they keep saying "any encryption", it's pretty clear they're talking about DES, which the NSA was pushing everyone to adopt. Remember how in the film the crew realizes that the NSA wants The Box to be able to snoop on the FBI et al? What did the NSA almost mandate be used for encrypting everything government related? Everyone strongly suspected right from the get-go that the key size for DES was far too short...to allow the NSA to brute-force it. We now know they turned out to be right. DES was published in '77 and almost immediately strongly criticized. According to Wikipedia: > Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes first conceived the idea for Sneakers in 1981, while doing research for WarGames. Doesn't seem like much of a coincidence that work on the Sneakers script started not long after DES was published and almost immediately viewed as a joke by the crypto community. I think Sneakers was a lot more realistic and well-researched than people give it credit.
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  > I think Sneakers was a lot more realistic and well-researched than people give it credit. Given that the screenwriter worked on it for nine years (something I just learned via this article) it sounds very plausible that he thorougly did his homework
- evgen 5y ago
  > it's pretty clear they're talking about DES, which the NSA was pushing everyone to adopt Nope, this was filmed in the mid-90s. Public-key encryption was the new hotness and DES was very old skool by this point. Since the 'A' in RSA was one of the technical advisors you can be fairly certain that the intended suggestion was that Janick's little black box could do linear time factorization of composite primes and recover the private key for a given public key. The story may have been in development for almost a decade but not the specific McGuffin used in the film.

Avshalom 5y ago

Even then, the box: "an ASIC implementation of a newly discovered crypto attack" complete with a massive white board full of linear algebra is about as good a muggufin as you can ask for in any computer adjacent movie.

myself248 5y ago
The only thing I don't love about it is the macguffin-ization itself. An algorithm is an idea and could've been communicated, published, spread around the world in the blink of an eye. Some years ago I wrote down a sketch of a sequel based on this exact idea, but the paper is encrypted and the key is sharded, and much of the plot revolves around trying to convince the trusted people who hold the shards that the researcher is actually dead and they should unseal the document, while the adversary tries to convince otherwise.
- MPSimmons 5y ago
  I'd read that.
- deanCommie 5y ago
  In a traditional definition of "algorithm", maybe. But think about a machine learning model or a neural network. The kind of breakthrough that will break RSA might not be describable in a research paper (sure, the science would be, but the science for neural networks took decades before it was able to be applied practically)

KennyBlanken 5y ago

The social engineering in the movie is pretty much the same stuff everyone talked about in DEFCON conferences even a decade or two later...and really, still topical today (phishing.) I think The Box was pretty realistic. It absolutely looks and acts the part of an FPGA type device. Finding a "shortcut" through computationally expensive encryption is plenty realistic (look at all the wifi attacks, for example), and while they keep saying "any encryption", it's pretty clear they're talking about DES, which the NSA was pushing everyone to adopt. Remember how in the film the crew realizes that the NSA wants The Box to be able to snoop on the FBI et al? What did the NSA almost mandate be used for encrypting everything government related? Everyone strongly suspected right from the get-go that the key size for DES was far too short...to allow the NSA to brute-force it. We now know they turned out to be right. DES was published in '77 and almost immediately strongly criticized. According to Wikipedia: > Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes first conceived the idea for Sneakers in 1981, while doing research for WarGames. Doesn't seem like much of a coincidence that work on the Sneakers script started not long after DES was published and almost immediately viewed as a joke by the crypto community. I think Sneakers was a lot more realistic and well-researched than people give it credit.

vanderZwan 5y ago
> I think Sneakers was a lot more realistic and well-researched than people give it credit. Given that the screenwriter worked on it for nine years (something I just learned via this article) it sounds very plausible that he thorougly did his homework
evgen 5y ago
> it's pretty clear they're talking about DES, which the NSA was pushing everyone to adopt Nope, this was filmed in the mid-90s. Public-key encryption was the new hotness and DES was very old skool by this point. Since the 'A' in RSA was one of the technical advisors you can be fairly certain that the intended suggestion was that Janick's little black box could do linear time factorization of composite primes and recover the private key for a given public key. The story may have been in development for almost a decade but not the specific McGuffin used in the film.