NCIS Writers

You’d think that someone who writes for NCIS would have paid more attention to the “facts of reality.”  This weeks episode involves a point where the team finds an object that can listen to a keyboard and records what keystrokes are pressed.  This may or may not be real (I’d think just installing any one of the back door programs would be much easier).  But, the “technical guy” on the team states that it is so that someone could figure out the password for the particular computer (still no problem).  The problem comes when he says that the person uses RSA encryption and doesn’t know his own password because of RSA.  Here’s the retarded thing: RSA encryption (just like DSA) is simply a generated pair of authentication keys (in varying length, but 1024 is the recommended minimum) based on a passphrase (can be anything, including nothing).  This keypair is identified as the public key and the private key.  Whoever generates the pair keeps the private key (and keeps it private) and places the public key wherever he wants to access through his RSA key (some examples are SSH-secure SHell access, and SFTP-Secure File Transfer Protocol).  Let me give a real example (since I use a DSA keypair to access my computers remotely).  I have a private key on my computer here.  Then on the computers I access (my webserver, my MythBox, etc), I have placed my public key in the proper location.  Now when I want to access a computer, all I type is ssh computer_name in a console/terminal and viola, I have access to that system.  If I had an actual passphrase, I’d have to input that when prompted, but at no point do I not know my passphrase.  The only possible way on NCIS for the person to “not know his password” is if the keypair was generated without a passphrase and before the person worked there.
But, it was also pretty cool to see in the same episode a mention of Celestia, a fine piece of software I have installed on my computer.  It’s licensed under the GNU GPL and has binaries for both Windows and Mac, as well an autopackage for Linux.