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The Science of Secrecy
Matthew Sparkes writes "Ever since the first codes and ciphers were developed, there has been a battle between those who want to keep their information secret, and those who want to read that information. It has been a purely intellectual war, but one that is often driven by motives from above that are far more violent. This book chronicles that battle, from it's inception, to the modern day, and outlines the techniques used to obfuscate information, and the fascinating history of the application of those techniques." Read the rest of Matthew's review.
The Science of Secrecy - The History of Codes and Codebreaking
author
Simon Singh
pages
224
publisher
Fourth Estate, London
rating
7
reviewer
Matthew Sparkes
ISBN
1841154350
summary
An historical look into cryptography and crypt-analysis, with a significant amount of technical knowledge to impart also.
Cryptography has been a tool largely used by governments to avoid their communications being read by the enemy or other unfriendly states, but historically it has also been utilized by individuals to protect their more questionable or taboo activities from discovery.
This battle is presented in the book as a rather bipolar trend; cryptographers trying to protect data and crypt-analysts trying to discover the meaning of that data. I found this to be slightly misleading. The representation of the history of the field as a constant struggle between two distinct parties does make for a more entertaining read, and adds an element of conflict by conjuring images of an ancient and continual intellectual game, but in reality these two groups are often one and the same.
Whilst I admit that the race to develop stronger codes and ciphers was in many ways separate from the race to break them, they were also inextricably linked, and undertaken by the same people. One has to allow a certain amount of poetic license in popular science books, especially in this case, as it has lightened what could have been a dry topic.
The way in which the book is structured allows a complete novice access. Starting from the first discoveries in cryptography and working forward chronologically, whilst explaining the method behind the discoveries, educates the reader in basic technique without effort. One reads a fascinating historical account, and later realizes that they now have a good understanding of the mathematical concepts behind these approaches they've been reading of.
The book places these techniques into context, giving historical examples of their use. Often they are revealed to have played large and important parts in famous events, ranging from wars and political plots, to events which are not even strictly related to cryptography.
For example it is shown how crypt-analytic approaches were utilized in the deciphering of ancient languages such as hieroglyphics. These languages are dead, in that there are no living individuals who have the ability to read them, and no information was available to help in their deciphering. By studying the frequency of letters or symbols in the text, as when attempting to break a cipher, it was possible to slowly read meaning into the text, and map the alphabet.
Many of these scripts were decrypted by amateur crypt-analysts, rather than academics. One point the author makes is that there are still many that remain a mystery, such as the Etruscan and Indus scripts. One has to wonder whether a book like this, combined with the current national fixation with puzzles such as Soduko, would create a resurgence in interest, and lead to some of these being broken.
One interesting point that the book makes is that the vast majority of work performed by cryptographers is done in secret, largely for security agencies all over the world, and that this has been true for some time. Therefore it is not uncommon for crypt-analysts to receive no recognition for their work, or to have a discovery attributed to them long after their death. These organizations must classify the work in the interest of national security, so in a way this book stands as an anonymous tribute to their cunning and multidisciplinary talent.
Examples from the book of such discoveries include Charles Babbage breaking the Vigenere cipher in 1854, which only came to light in the 1970s. The author suggests that the work was kept secret to aid the Royal Navy, as it occurred just after the Crimean War started. The credit for the discovery instead fell to a retired Prussian army officer who independently discovered it in 1863.
This is shown to be one of the enduring themes of the story of cryptography, leading right through to the 1970s where credit for developing the RSA cryptographic technique went to Diffie, Hellman and Merkle in 1975, despite being developed in 1969 at GCHQ, a fact that was only publicly admitted in 1997.
A section of the book that will be of particular appeal to computer scientists is where cryptography is shown to have given birth to computing. Born from the desire for a method to perform simple operations on numbers very quickly. Computers now dominate the field of cryptography and crypt-analysis, and their ability to perform a task millions of times with no errors has transformed the science. It is also noted how much we rely on cryptography daily, in areas such as e-commerce, where our details are encrypted without us even being aware of the fact.
The final chapter is an examination into the politics of cryptography, and a balanced look into the ethical implications of governmental snooping on communication, versus the possible benefits of reducing serious crime and terrorism. This is clearly a very pertinent point in todays political climate, and a balanced look at this issue is a very valuable thing. With the heightened risk of terrorist attack, or at least the public perception of such, the government are intercepting more and more communications for analysis, and encryption by criminals is becoming more and more popular.
The book covers the topic well; from governmental use, to anecdotes about lovers exchanging secret messages. Throughout this the reader is constantly being eased into the mathematical technique behind, in a manner that does not require a background in mathematics. There is an appendix to the book, in the form of 5 cipher challenges for the reader to attempt to crack. The knowledge gleaned from the book should be preparation enough to do so, and will fascinate the curious nature of the books audience.
Matthew Sparkes' is a journalist and programmer, his homepage is Non-Tech City."
You can purchase The Science of Secrecy from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Cryptography has been a tool largely used by governments to avoid their communications being read by the enemy or other unfriendly states, but historically it has also been utilized by individuals to protect their more questionable or taboo activities from discovery.
This battle is presented in the book as a rather bipolar trend; cryptographers trying to protect data and crypt-analysts trying to discover the meaning of that data. I found this to be slightly misleading. The representation of the history of the field as a constant struggle between two distinct parties does make for a more entertaining read, and adds an element of conflict by conjuring images of an ancient and continual intellectual game, but in reality these two groups are often one and the same.
Whilst I admit that the race to develop stronger codes and ciphers was in many ways separate from the race to break them, they were also inextricably linked, and undertaken by the same people. One has to allow a certain amount of poetic license in popular science books, especially in this case, as it has lightened what could have been a dry topic.
The way in which the book is structured allows a complete novice access. Starting from the first discoveries in cryptography and working forward chronologically, whilst explaining the method behind the discoveries, educates the reader in basic technique without effort. One reads a fascinating historical account, and later realizes that they now have a good understanding of the mathematical concepts behind these approaches they've been reading of.
The book places these techniques into context, giving historical examples of their use. Often they are revealed to have played large and important parts in famous events, ranging from wars and political plots, to events which are not even strictly related to cryptography.
For example it is shown how crypt-analytic approaches were utilized in the deciphering of ancient languages such as hieroglyphics. These languages are dead, in that there are no living individuals who have the ability to read them, and no information was available to help in their deciphering. By studying the frequency of letters or symbols in the text, as when attempting to break a cipher, it was possible to slowly read meaning into the text, and map the alphabet.
Many of these scripts were decrypted by amateur crypt-analysts, rather than academics. One point the author makes is that there are still many that remain a mystery, such as the Etruscan and Indus scripts. One has to wonder whether a book like this, combined with the current national fixation with puzzles such as Soduko, would create a resurgence in interest, and lead to some of these being broken.
One interesting point that the book makes is that the vast majority of work performed by cryptographers is done in secret, largely for security agencies all over the world, and that this has been true for some time. Therefore it is not uncommon for crypt-analysts to receive no recognition for their work, or to have a discovery attributed to them long after their death. These organizations must classify the work in the interest of national security, so in a way this book stands as an anonymous tribute to their cunning and multidisciplinary talent.
Examples from the book of such discoveries include Charles Babbage breaking the Vigenere cipher in 1854, which only came to light in the 1970s. The author suggests that the work was kept secret to aid the Royal Navy, as it occurred just after the Crimean War started. The credit for the discovery instead fell to a retired Prussian army officer who independently discovered it in 1863.
This is shown to be one of the enduring themes of the story of cryptography, leading right through to the 1970s where credit for developing the RSA cryptographic technique went to Diffie, Hellman and Merkle in 1975, despite being developed in 1969 at GCHQ, a fact that was only publicly admitted in 1997.
A section of the book that will be of particular appeal to computer scientists is where cryptography is shown to have given birth to computing. Born from the desire for a method to perform simple operations on numbers very quickly. Computers now dominate the field of cryptography and crypt-analysis, and their ability to perform a task millions of times with no errors has transformed the science. It is also noted how much we rely on cryptography daily, in areas such as e-commerce, where our details are encrypted without us even being aware of the fact.
The final chapter is an examination into the politics of cryptography, and a balanced look into the ethical implications of governmental snooping on communication, versus the possible benefits of reducing serious crime and terrorism. This is clearly a very pertinent point in todays political climate, and a balanced look at this issue is a very valuable thing. With the heightened risk of terrorist attack, or at least the public perception of such, the government are intercepting more and more communications for analysis, and encryption by criminals is becoming more and more popular.
The book covers the topic well; from governmental use, to anecdotes about lovers exchanging secret messages. Throughout this the reader is constantly being eased into the mathematical technique behind, in a manner that does not require a background in mathematics. There is an appendix to the book, in the form of 5 cipher challenges for the reader to attempt to crack. The knowledge gleaned from the book should be preparation enough to do so, and will fascinate the curious nature of the books audience.
Matthew Sparkes' is a journalist and programmer, his homepage is Non-Tech City."
You can purchase The Science of Secrecy from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Between Silk and Cyanide : A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945; Leo Marks
Enigma; Robert Harris
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The book isn't available at Barnes and Noble, but you can buy it here for as low as $4.86: Science of Secrecy: The Secret History of Codes and Codebreaking. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!
An fun novel by Neal Stephenson about WWII's codebreaking effort and turing machines, among other things.
Polyalphabetic ciphers like the Vigenete are old - 1500s. They replaced the easy to crack alphabetic ciphers used previously. A much more effective cipher was an iterative alphabetic cipher like that used on the Enigma; it was a successive series of alphabetic substitutions, but the substitutions changed based on what letter was typed previously (each letter would rotate the substitution wheels by varying amounts).
Does this book cover the Voynich Manuscript? I'd be interested in seing if someone cracks that (or determines that it says nothing - still, it's interesting that it follows Ziph's law!).
By a scallop's forelocks!
Take a peek at his website: http://simonsingh.net/. As a math enthusiast, I really liked "Fermat's Last Theorem."
I am not left-handed, either!
The first thing I wanted to know when I looked at this review was, "How is this different from his previous, The Code Book ??
The answer is, not much at all, by the author's own admission:
In other words, if you've already read The Code Book (and you should! It's great!), you won't need to rush out and buy Science of Secrecy -- but if you want to get a gift for someone, a hardback copy of The Science of Secrecy (along with the DVDs of the TV series if available) might server better.
The book's correct title is "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography". (See title at Amazon.)
I'm a little surprised we're seeing a review of it only now; it's 5 or 6 years old. I have it, and greatly enjoyed it.
Is the reviewer clueless of crypto history? "This is shown to be one of the enduring themes of the story of cryptography, leading right through to the 1970s where credit for developing the RSA cryptographic technique went to Diffie, Hellman and Merkle in 1975, despite being developed in 1969 at GCHQ, a fact that was only publicly admitted in 1997" RSA=Rivest Shamir Adleman. Diffie, hellman and Mercle introduced the concept public key crypto. Diffie and Hellman based their DH scheme on the difficulty of the discrete log problem. RSA introduced public key crypto based on the hardness of factorization of a large composite.
I think someone is confused here. RSA asymmetric key cryptography and Diffie-Hellman Key exchange are two fundamentally different procedures. Although at the end of the day allow two parts to come to the agreement of a shared secret, both also however suffer from the pain in the arse that is PKI. One reason why no-one hears much about DiffieHellman is that Diffie-Hellman keys/parameters are usually generated per secure comms session and not persistently stores. ALthough the computational hit to do this is nothing like generating RSA pub/priv keys it is still a major bottleneck. With RSA you can generate your keys once, with DH you generate them per-session. So in the context of a secure comms session. I could use RSA to wrap some AES keys and have my protocol up and running in a metter of seconds or I could use DH and take a 15-30 second hit to generate my DH paramaters, from which I can generate a shared secret to act as my a gen. for my AES key. If anyone is more interested in the area, I'd recomment Practical Cryptography and Applied Cryptography, both by Bruce Schneier. http://www.schneier.com/books.html Both are excellent works for getting to know the algorithms inside-out and understanding how to implment communications security in the real world.
While the show may have been shown on the Discovery Channel, it was originally made for the UK's "Channel Four" network by Diverse Productions. It was written by Simon Singh, so the same-name thing is not just a coincidence.
... wide variety of subject matter they deal with. (One might almost call it 'diverse' ... okay, I'm done.)
Diverse lists it on their website, but there's no link to a DVD or any other signs that it exists. Too bad, because at 5, 30-minute episodes it would make a good two disc set (throw one 30-minute reel of extras on there and you'd have two 90 minute DVDs). I'd bet they'd make far more revenue from that then they would from having it sit around in their archives.
Their web page for the series is:
http://www.diverse.tv/programme.aspx?id=8
In a completely unrelated note, they are apparently looking for families who want to be on a show they're filming for TLC here in the US. Very
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