Cryptonomicon

Stephenson's 1999 novel runs two stories in parallel, half a century apart, joined by cryptography and by family. In the Second World War, a mathematician in the United States Navy is assigned to a unit so secret that only a handful of people know of it, whose task is to make use of the broken Enigma code without ever letting the enemy realise it has been broken. That constraint is the interesting part, since every action taken on the intelligence risks revealing that it exists, and the unit has to manufacture plausible reasons for what it already knows. In the present day, the mathematician's grandson is trying to build a data haven in Southeast Asia, a jurisdiction where encrypted information can be held beyond the reach of governments, and the plot pulls the two periods together. The novel is long, digressive and technical by design, with genuine cryptographic material worked into the fiction. This vault cites it as fiction, and anything factual taken from it needs a real source.

Written from the publisher description, Open Library.

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Reliability

Not audited here. 1 note in this vault draws on it.

People

• Neal Stephenson