Code Book: Simon Singh

When I got this book from my friend Samyuktha, I flipped through the pages and told her that it looked like some textbook. I could not have been more wrong. One can call it a textbook, in the sense that the book was very educative. It presents the history of cryptography and cryptanalysis and its impact on world history in the most interesting way. Reading the book, I was amazed at the power of the human brain, to have come up with such breakthrough ideas of encryption and encoding and to have broken them too!

The first breakthrough in the field of cryptography was when the Arabs invented the monoalphabetic substitution cipher. Want to what it does?

The polyalphabetic substitution cipher was considered the indestructible cipher till the 19th century, when Charles Babbage succesfully deciphered it. Want to know how?

When the Allies were fighting the First World War against Germany, America's President Woodrow Wilson didn't want to enter the war, believing that peaceful negotiations was what was necessary and not wasteful loss of lives. A small work of brilliant cryptanalysis by the British secret service agency was all that was needed for the Allies to destroy permanently, America's Age of Innocence. Want to know what made America enter the war?

The breaking of Germany's infamous Enigma cipher by Marian Rejewski and Alan Turing was instrumental in ending the Second World War earlier, by more than three years, than it would have taken otherwise. The probability of finding the correct initial settings of the Engima was 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000. To put this in context a persistent cryptanalyst who tries one setting every minute, would take longer than the age of the universe to guess the correct setting. Want to know how they broke it?

When the Rosetta Stone was excavated, the archaeologists had a crib (a hold), to even start translating the Egyptian Hieroglyphs, as the stone contained the same piece of text in three languages: Hieroglyphic, Greek and Cryptos. But when the tablets of Crete were discovered, containing unknown symbols, whose pronunciation, let alone the meaning could not be guessed, pure logical reasoning and ingenious assumptions helped unravel the mysteries of the language used 500 years before even the Greek civilisaion was supposed to have begun. Want to know how the language, named Linear B, was translated?

Alice wants to send a message to Bob, without Eve knowing the content of the message. She puts the message in the box and locks it with a padlock, keeping the key to herself. She sends the box to Bob, who locks it with his padlock and sends it back. Alice now removes her lock and sends it back. Now Bob can open the box without a problem as he has the key to his padlock. But will the same idea solve the problem of key-distribution while encrypting real-life messages. For, in real-life encryption techniques, the more accurate analogy would be if Bob puts Alices box inside his box and locks it with his key. Alice cannot remove her lock if she can't open Bob's lock. Could cryptography not depend on the order of encryption and not be too trivial(like the caeser's cipher), at the same time? Was this problem ever solved?

Why is there such a craze among mathematicians and computer programmers to find the largest prime number? What is the future of cryptography and cryptanalysis? What are quantum computers? What is quantum cryptography? To know the answer to all these interesting questions and more read the book.

I can now with confidence, say that I can start attempting to crack the now-seemingly-easy ciphers that I encounter in many competitions in my college, without having to resort to google or the internet. The book is a definite must-read.