The science of secrecy: The secret history of codes and codebreaking by Simon Singh

The science of secrecy: The secret history of codes and codebreaking Reviews

• 
  Jeff Waltersdorf

  Enjoyable book. I haven't seen the BBC series that this book is a companion to, but I do want to seek it out. A nice combination of history and anecdotes putting the development of codes and codebreaking in good perspective. Enough math detail to follow the major developments. Bonus points for the "homework" assignments at the end--five encoded messages of increasing difficulty levels that you can practice on.
  
  It's several years old now, but the "modern era" stuff is still interesting and relevant, if the exact computer specifications are now dated.
  
  It was fascinating to read this at the same time as I was working through Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (featuring a modern crypto network), and also watching the Frontline documentary United States of Secrets (about the post-9/11 growth of the NSA, through the Snowden revelations). This provided a nice primer of the history and the mathematics for both of those.
  
  I've got a pair of Bruce Schneier books on cryptography that I now feel comfortable diving into soon.
• 
  Pritam Chattopadhyay

  Secrets are imperative. Keeping a secret out of harm's way is just as imperative. One way someone might prefer to defend a secret is by acting as if there is no secret. If someone doesn’t suspect you have a secret they are not going to go snooping. This is the idea behind the ancient practice of steganography, the holy grail of Cryptology. Steganography is a type of communication where a message is kept hidden. The word “steganography” comes from two Greek words: steganos, which means “covered,” and graphein, which means “to write.” Covered writing! In other words, hidden secrets!
  
  Cryptology is the science of secret writing. It is made up of two halves; cryptography consists of the techniques for creating systems of secret writing and cryptanalysis encompasses the techniques of breaking them. Over the past 2500 years, cryptology has developed numerous types of systems to hide messages and subsequently a rich vocabulary in which to describe them.
  
  For eons, rulers have relied on proficient communication with the purpose of overseeing their dominions and command their armies. At the same time, they have all been aware of the consequences of their messages falling into the wrong hands, revealing precious secrets to rival nations and betraying vital information to opposing forces. It was the threat of enemy interception that motivated the development of codes and ciphers: techniques for disguising a message so that only the intended recipient can read it.
  
  The desire for secrecy has meant that nations have operated codemaking departments, responsible for ensuring the security of communications by inventing and implementing the best possible codes.
  
  At the same time, enemy codebreakers have attempted to rupture these codes, and steal secrets. Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists, a numinous tribe attempting to juggle shrewd words out of hollow symbols.
  
  The history of codes and ciphers is the story of the centuries-old battle between codemakers and codebreakers, an intellectual arms race that has had a dramatic impact on the course of history.
  
  This fascinating book (my best read of 2021 thus far) is a history of cryptology from the time of Julius Caesar up through around the present. It also covers the diverse forms of cryptographic algorithms used to generate secret messages and it discusses techniques for breaking secret messages. There are more than a few examples in the text that exemplify the algorithms in use.
  
  It is, of course, not meant to be a comprehensive history of either cryptology or the algorithms themselves.
  
  Apart from the Introduction, the book is divided into the following chapters:
  
  1. The Cipher of Mary Queen of Scots
  2. Le Chiffre Indéchiffrable
  3. The Mechanization of Secrecy
  4. Cracking the Enigma
  5. The Language Barrier
  6. Alice and Bob Go Public
  7. Pretty Good Privacy
  8. A Quantum Leap into the Future
  
  In writing The Code Book, the author says to have had two main objectives:
  
  1) He charts the evolution of codes. Evolution is a wholly appropriate term, because the development of codes can be viewed as an evolutionary struggle. A code is constantly under attack from codebreakers. When the codebreakers have developed a new weapon that reveals a code’s weakness, then the code is no longer useful. It either becomes extinct or it evolves into a new, stronger code. In turn, this new code thrives only until the codebreakers identify its weakness, and so on.
  
  2) Having discussed the evolution of codes and their impact on history, the book’s second objective is to demonstrate how the subject is more relevant today than ever before.
  
  As information becomes an increasingly valuable commodity, and as the communications revolution changes society, so the process of encoding messages, known as encryption, will play an increasing role in everyday life. Nowadays our phone calls bounce off satellites and our e-mails pass through various computers, and both forms of communication can be intercepted with ease, so jeopardizing our privacy.
  
  Correspondingly, as to a greater extent business is conducted over the Internet, protections must be put in place to defend companies and their clients. Encryption is the only way to care for our privacy and guarantee the success of the digital marketplace.
  
  The art of secret communication, conversely known as cryptography, will provide the locks and keys of the Information Age.
  
  Whatever the raison d'être for having a secret, the goal is: keep the secret safe!
  
  So, can you crack the code?
  
  Can you uncover the secret?
  
  The codemaker sure hopes not. They’ve gone to a lot of snag to keep the secret safe.
  
  This begins the battle between codemakers and codebreakers. Since ancient history, codemakers have worked very hard to build the strongest codes to protect their most important secrets, but codebreakers keep finding more powerful methods for cracking those codes.
  
  As the codemakers get more sophisticated, so do the codebreakers.
  
  This book teaches you and informs you all about cryptography, encryption, hacking, and cybersecurity. All of that is pretty cool, but there’s more! This book is more than meets the eye. It’s not just a book. It’s actually one big secret for you to crack.
  
  One must read it circumspectly. Only the smartest codebreakers will spot all the intimations in this book to crack the code and unlock the secret.
  
  Read more to find out.
  
• 
  Shah Yasser Aziz

  The book gives a brilliant overview of the history of cryptography and explains all types of cryptographic methods that emerged ever since the ancient times. These were layman explanations, hence i comprehended all of it. If you're learning about cryptography for the first time, go ahead and read it!
• 
  Sheepdog

  Outstanding. Does a good job of "building the story" from the beginnings of secret writing to the modern wonders, but doesn't "plod".
  
  Also, it doesn't it get bogged down in too many minutiae... and again, "but"... but doesn't leave the reader frustrated by being too superficial.
  
  Offers something for everything. If ciphers are "your thing", you will be in clover, but this is NOT a book just for the geeks. Not only does it discuss the inner workings of many ciphers, but it also discusses when and how secret writing made a difference in people's lives, to our history, going beyond the secret-writing elements of those stories along the way which I found interesting in themselves. But doesn't ever digress too far.
  
  Very readable, if you have even a tiny willingness to follow a logical chain of operations.
  
  Uses terms carefully, and explains the correct terminology for the areas covered.
  
  o jp[r upi ;olr oy.
  
  That isn't anything arcane, but I hope it amuses. I'm not good at mental arithmetic. Even so, I wrote it just now in less than half a minute, without recourse to scrap paper, pencil, etc. A nice illustration of a not-very-secure cipher that has the virtue of being easy for sender and receiver to use. Might also be useful for...
  
  doyrvtrfd[sddeptfd
  
  If you want to spend five minutes getting into each webpage that interests you, there are ciphers your could use to be "really secure". But if you raise just a LITTLE barrier to the Bad Guys, it may be enough to persuade them to ignore you, go after even lower hanging fruit. (By this logic you may want to hide easy-to-remember passwords behind a simple cipher.. or a code. Not the same thing! Explained in book.)
  
  (If you spot errors-of-encryption in either of the mini-challenges above, they are just typos, not a tease to see who will write and say "you made a mistake...)
• 
  Missy

  Takes a journey through the history of ciphers, cryptography and cryptoanalysis. It was written before the events of 11 September 2001, so it is somewhat dated in it's referencing to events and politicians in the "now", the internet and it's developments.
  
  It is a useful place to start as it gives a nice overview without presuming any previous knowledge of ciphers, etc and there is very little in the way of bogging down in the details of each development described. A good introductory book, that also relates to a BBC production.
• 
  SammyBoy

  It was long reading for me but worth every page. Why do we like mystery n secrets