Sneakers Review, was it RSA?
Cyberpunk review has posted a review of one of my favourite movies “Sneakers”.
I went to town commenting, and am including it here as well:
This is one of my favourite movies (up there with Bladerunner).
I saw this gem when I was in high school. It made a pretty good mark on me then, and when I revisited years later (about 10 or so) it was still a great film. I also struggle with the “is it cyberpunk”, but I really like yor analysis .. ubiquitous access to information, underground (maybe underdog) focus.
Interestingly, looking at this now I think the cryptographic stuff is talking about RSA encryption algorithm (Public Key, used in SSL when you log in to secure websites and other things). In the movie, it talks about only being able to crack US government crypto and not russian. The Russians do have their own crypto algorithms (GOST standard, Russian ISO equivalent) because they didn’t trust the USA ciphers during the cold war.
This rates in my book as the most realistic hacker movie out there. It encompasses the social engineering, physical and cryptographic aspects of security. They did their homework on this before making it. I guess this is a “modern day cyberpunk” .. and not a distant future, high tech dystopia .. that’s what makes it so good.
I definitely put it in the 8-9 /10 category.
Having studied cryptography at university and working for a company thay provides cryptographic software and services, I really dig the believability of what this movie is talking about. Mathematics is at the core of cryptography, but without talking too much math, they have eluded to a breakthrough in what would seem to be number factorisation. That’s the holy grail, fast large number factorisation .. because RSA is based on two prime numbers multiplied together. It’s computationaly expensive to work backwards to try and factorise it, like 100s of years. Read RSA encryption algorithm for more, better explained information about the algorithm.
Anyway .. back to the movie. The mentioned technology above just makes this believable. It was a funny movie with good dialogue, and (I think) is still watchable today. I am curious to see what someone thinks of the movie if they’ve never seen it before .. am I just remembering nostalgia?
A quote from the movie (as noted on Cyberpunk review as well):
“… I learned that everything in this world, including money, operates not on reality. — But the perception of reality.”
If you like hacker movies or conspiracy theories, this movie is defintively for you, but it still a good movie that even a non-geek can enjoy.
Rating: 8.5/10