http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacGuffin

Never read the book so not sure how integral the technical details are to the plot. But this sounds like it could be excused as a mere plot device or by appealing to the Suspension of Disbelief.

I agree it would probably be wiser narratively and aesthetically to let our hero, the Cryptographical Expert, gloss over the technical details and just say to the pushy Head Bureacrat at some point early in the novel something like, "I could try to explain this to you but I don't fully understand it myself."

The less pardonable offense where Dan Brown's writing is concerned, both in my limited experience and as others in this thread have pointed out, is the lousy writing.

"Recherche" which is what journalists and authors do, to find information for Articles and Stories.

And

"Forschung" which is what scientists do with experiments.

I often have the feeling English speaking people like to play with the fact that these things are called the same in English.

> Now Susan was even more doubtful. Encryption algorithms were just mathematical formulas, recipes for scrambling text into code. Mathematicians and programmers created new algorithms every day. There were hundreds of them on the market-PGP, Diffie-Hellman, ZIP, IDEA, El Gamal. TRANSLTR broke all of their codes every day, no problem. To TRANSLTR all codes looked identical, regardless of which algorithm wrote them.

However, I couldn't help but read a bit further, where the Achilles Heel of TRANSLTR is identified - 'rotating clear text':

> The notion of a rotating cleartext function was first put forth in an obscure, 1987 paper by a Hungarian mathematician, Josef Harne. Because brute-force computers broke codes by examining cleartext for identifiable word patterns, Harne proposed an encryption algorithm that, in addition to encrypting, shifted decrypted cleartext over a time variant. In theory, the perpetual mutation would ensure that the attacking computer would never locate recognizable word patterns and thus never know when it had found the proper key. The concept was somewhat like the idea of colonizing Mars-fathomable on an intellectual level, but, at present, well beyond human ability.

Of course, neither Harne nor the notion of 'rotating clear text' actually exist!

Brown's work is full of ass pulls like this. Much of the plot of the book hinges on the "Bergofsky principle", which is, roughly, that "any crypto can be cracked". It's one of those nonce names thrown in to add scientific gravitas -- like "Tannhauser gate". But of course not only was there no Bergofsky and no such principle, but the opposite is the case in our current understanding of cryptographic math: there are some ciphers such as the one time pad which are, in principle, totally uncrackable. (They are also extremely cumbersome to use, and their cumbersomeness makes them prone to attack in other ways, so we make do with "uncrackable for all intents and purposes given current-era hardware").

Of course, when I first read about Satoshi Nakamoto I giggled a bit and thought of Ensei Tankado...

It's everything else that makes no sense whatsoever.

* A single lone researcher getting beam time on the LHC, without anybody knowing what the experiment was doing. I don't care how brilliant a person is, you're not doing experiments at that scale without having it be approved ahead of time.

* Perfect antimatter containment in large quantities. There's going to be some leakage, resulting in detectable gamma rays.

* Portable antimatter containment. Penning traps require large magnetic and electric fields, not exactly conducive to transportation.

* Countdown on a storage device with no safety margin. I can understand having a countdown to the engineered safe period. I cannot understand having the storage device shut off at exactly that time, rather than continuing to use whatever power it has.

* Inability to track wireless cameras. There is a camera pointed at the hidden antimatter containment device, and no attempt is ever made to track the signal from that camera.

* Failure to use binary search. (This is the only one that doesn't occur within the plot's setup, so avoiding giving spoilers.)