> 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

> 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.