Anchor Books | 1999 | 411 páginas | epub | 5,3 Mb
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Confronted with the prospect of defeat, the Allied cryptanalysts had worked night and day to penetrate German ciphers. It would appear that fear was the main driving force, and that adversity is one of the foundations of successful codebreaking.
In the information age, the fear that drives cryptographic improvements is both capitalistic and libertarian--corporations need encryption to ensure that their secrets don't fall into the hands of competitors and regulators, and ordinary people need encryption to keep their everyday communications private in a free society. Similarly, the battles for greater decryption power come from said competitors and governments wary of insurrection.
The Code Book is an excellent primer for those wishing to understand how the human need for privacy has manifested itself through cryptography. Singh's accessible style and clear explanations of complex algorithms cut through the arcane mathematical details without oversimplifying. --Therese Littleton
Contents
Epigraph
Introduction
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
The Cipher Challenge
Appendices
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
