Cryptology 101

You're right. Despite what some people WISH, most people who watch films believe most of what they see, unless it's so blatantly obvious that there's no possible way it could be true. Some will even believe that. Just hang around after a film, and listen to the comments. So in addition to simple self-respect, filmmakers have a duty to audiences to be up front about what can actually happen.

Still, I wish the OP had detailed what specifically was wrong.

Based on my basic knowledge of cryptography (cryptology?) I'm fairly certain that with a code more recent than Enigma, no idiot savant is going to be able to crack the code unaided. But this kid didn't just decipher the message, which would be difficult enough, but he actually cracked the code, at least for decoding purposes. And he cracked it without knowing any of the message contents beforehand. The chance of that happening by accident is so small that it's not worth considering. On the other hand, the math required isn't just larger than what most of us can do... it's larger than many computers can do (a moving target, of course).

To break the code, you have to have some precise expectation of what the sample encoded message contains. Then you work on ways to try to decode it. These things take time.

But for me, this wasn't the weakest part of the film. The guys at the code lab were just moronic.

And I found the title of the film's reference to Mercury (as in vaccines containing mercury producing autism in children) to be in bad bad taste. By the way, it's been proven that the vaccines are safe, and do not make kids autistic. Just this last year, record numbers of children have died due to not being vaccinated, due to this conspiracy theory.

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r2626
I notice that it has been over two years and the OP hasn't responded to tell anyone what was wrong with the cryptology

I guess someone should take care of that, then.

When this movie was made, there were already several uncrackable encryption algorithms available. One, for example, was Blowfish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowfish_(cipher).
"There is no effective cryptanalysis on the full-round version of Blowfish known publicly as of 2011"

Which means that there is no way to crack it other than trying every possible encryption key (the equivalent of a password).

Since Blowfish supports keys of up to 448 bits (binary digits, 0 and 1), the number of possible keys is 2^448 (2 to the 448th power, or 2 multiplied by itself 448 times). This number is about 7 with 134 zeros after it. Per https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm,
the time required to try every possible combination, assuming a

"Massive Cracking Array Scenario:
(Assuming one hundred trillion guesses per second)
- like maybe NSA has -- is

3.53 hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion centuries.

I don't care if this kid and Rain Man do a mind-meld, they're not going to break it before the Universe ends.

So the fundamental premise of the movie is laughable, as the OP said. It gets better:

"The NSA has developed what they believe is an unbreakable code which they call MERCURY. Now they ran a test to see if anyone can decipher the code by putting it in a puzzle magazine".

That's not how they test them. Or design them, as far as we know. They invite cryptographers to submit proposed encryption methods, then let them try to break each other's, and let anyone else try, too. But not by publishing in puzzle mags, but in professional journals, Gov and cryptography web sites, etc.

It's possible that NSA might design its own, but if you want to keep it a secret, why tell the public about it? But they don't keep such systems a secret, because that makes them weaker, if anyone who discovers the algorithm can break the code. They *want* the public exposure, because another fundamental rule of good cryptography is that the system must be uncrackable even if the adversary knows the system (the encryption algorithm). In other words, crypto systems used today are all publicly available. It must depend *only* on the adversary not knowing, or being able to deduce, the key.

@ walkinglizard

Cryptology is for virgins

It's tempting to say that trolling is for virgins, but here's the serious answer:
You couldn't do online shopping or banking safely without cryptography, so every time you do that, thank those virgins. ;) (I'm not one of them -- not a cryptographer. Or a virgin, for that matter, but that's TMI, I think. :)

@ sschind:

Yeah, I had the same problem with Star Wars. Couldn't possibly happen so I just couldn't watch it.

Can you not differentiate between science fiction/fantasy and present-day drama? Or historical drama? Anything can happen in a galaxy far, far, away, or in the 23rd Century. And we understand that Superman or Spiderman isn't actually possible, but we go along for the sake of a good "let's pretend" movie. Suspense films, especially those involving real-world events, should make us think "Yeah, that *could* really happen", so that we get more involved in them. OP's complaint was that the entire premise was wrong, implausible, flawed, etc., which makes us not want to get so invested in the plot and characters.

As rqcustomer put it:

You're right. Despite what some people WISH, most people who watch films believe most of what they see, unless it's so blatantly obvious that there's no possible way it could be true. Some will even believe that. Just hang around after a film, and listen to the comments. So in addition to simple self-respect, filmmakers have a duty to audiences to be up front about what can actually happen.

Super/Spidermen are blatantly obvious figments of wild imagination, as was "Star Wars", etc. No problem. But there's no suspense to a suspense flic if we're sitting here going, "Are you s**tting me? No way!" etc. Make it believable, which means: in accordance with reality.

Filmmakers can find plenty of good plots based in reality. Most are too lazy to fact-check the stories that get submitted to them, or figure no one cares, or won't go to the time and effort to get things right. Isn't that why there's a "goof" section here?"

Or as kersus said,

The responsibility is on the writers to not spread falsifications dressed up as truth because they're too lazy to spend even ten minutes on research.

btw, after reading all of these, I've decided not to watch it. Hope this info helps regarding OP and other comments.


Minor item for those who wondered about cryptology/cryptography:

For real hair-splitters, cryptography is the art and science of designing codes and ciphers (this was a cipher, not a code), of which cryptanalysis is a subset - the art and science of breaking them. Cryptology is the study of cryptography itself as a science - the "how" and "why" of what cryptographers do. But most dictionaries accept "cryptology" and "cryptography" as usable interchangeably, at least in informal use. Professionals who write and break codes and ciphers generally refer to themselves as cryptographers.






Never believe anything that comes out of Hollywood.

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