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 top

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.