The Code Book

Simon Singh has written a readable and timely book about what he suggests is the Golden Age of Cryptography, complete with tales of code-breaking intrigue from Mary Queen of Scots to the NSA. Codes have dramatically altered the history of the world. Quantum cryptography will take the evolution of secrecy to a completely different level. The Code Book author Simon Singh pages 401 publisher Doubleday rating 8/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-385-49531-5 summary The evolution of cryptography, from Mary Queen of Scots to the NSA

Simon Singh has written a readable, comprehensible and significant book about cryptography.

"The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy From Mary, Queen of Scots, to Quantum Cryptography" (Doubleday, $US 24) chronicles the obsessive human interest in and importance of codes, from Elizabethan England to the intrigue-riddled halls of the NSA and the era of quantum cryptography.

Secrets and the codes that protect them are important. They've brought about the rise and fall of monarchs and won wars; in some techno-circles, cryptography is almost becoming a religion. Issues surrounding codes speak directly to the Net, computing, freedom, privacy and power. Singh, a British author, producer and physicist, wrote the best-selling "Fermat's Enigma," and directed a documentary on Fermat's Last Theorm that aired on PBS's "Nova" series.

From tales of buried treasure, to stories of how the legendary mathematician and code breaker Alan Turing secretly helped defeat the Nazis and how Navajos (called code walkers) used their language to fight the Japanese, Singh puts our contemporary fascination with cryptography into perspective. He writes crisply and logically, and an instinct for talking about cryptography in terms of its most interesting tales.

"For two thousand years, codemakers have fought to preserve secrets while codebreakers have tried their best to reveal them," he explains. "It has always been a neck-and-neck race,with codebreakers battling back when codemakers seemed to be in command, and codemakers inventing new and stronger forms of encryption when previous methods had been compromised."

This battle becomes increasingly more intense and relevant, as the free-wheeling structure of the Internet increasingly collides with the perceived interests of individual citizens, with privacy, and with the interests and operations of law enforcement officials and national security organizations.

Singh suggests that we are entering a golden age of cryptography. He quotes one cryptographer as saying: "It is now possible to make ciphers in modern cryptography that are really, really out of reach of all known forms of cryptanalysis. And I think it's going to stay that way." This view, writes Singh, is supported by one of the NSA's Deputy Directors, who told him: "If all the personal computers in the world - approximately 260 million computers - were to be put to work on a single PGP encrypted message, it would take on average an estimated 12 million times the age of the universe to break a single message."

"The Code Book" even ends with "The Cipher Challenge: 10 Steps to $15,000." Singh offers a code -breaking challenge in 10 separate stages. I'll pass, but some of you might want take a shot at it.

Cryptography is a complex, even arcane subject for laypeople and non techno-heads to read about it. To Singh's credit, he's written a book that cryptographers and newbies can love equally. "The Code Book" unlocks the sometimes impenetrable complexity that surrounds cyptography, an achievement all its own.

You can pick this book up at Amazon.