Covert communications have won or lost wars, exposed political intrigue, disguised secret religions and societies, and secured financial transactions. This immensely readable world history of clandestine communication—finally in paperback—includes illustrations, diagrams, and puzzles that instruct readers how to become amateur cryptographers. It’s the last word on secret languages!
This illustrated encyclopedia surveys the history and development of code-making and code-breaking in all areas of culture and society from hieroglyphs and runes to DNA, the Zodiac Killer, graffiti, and beyond.
Communications represent a strategic sector for privacy protection and for personal, company, national and international security. The interception, damage or lost of information during communication can generate material and non material economic damages from both a personal and collective point of view. The purpose of this book is to give the reader information relating to all aspects of communications security, beginning at the base ideas and building to reach the most advanced and updated concepts. The book will be of interest to integrated system designers, telecommunication designers, system engineers, system analysts, security managers, technicians, intelligence personnel, security personnel, police, army, private investigators, scientists, graduate and postgraduate students and anyone that needs to communicate in a secure way.
"As gripping as a good thriller." --The Washington Post Unpack the science of secrecy and discover the methods behind cryptography--the encoding and decoding of information--in this clear and easy-to-understand young adult adaptation of the national bestseller that's perfect for this age of WikiLeaks, the Sony hack, and other events that reveal the extent to which our technology is never quite as secure as we want to believe. Coders and codebreakers alike will be fascinated by history's most mesmerizing stories of intrigue and cunning--from Julius Caesar and his Caeser cipher to the Allies' use of the Enigma machine to decode German messages during World War II. Accessible, compelling, and timely, The Code Book is sure to make readers see the past--and the future--in a whole new way. "Singh's power of explaining complex ideas is as dazzling as ever." --The Guardian
The award-winning New York Times bestseller about the American women who secretly served as codebreakers during World War II--a "prodigiously researched and engrossing" (New York Times) book that "shines a light on a hidden chapter of American history" (Denver Post). Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history; now, through dazzling research and interviews with surviving code girls, bestselling author Liza Mundy brings to life this riveting and vital story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.
Cryptography, the art and science of creating secret codes, and cryptanalysis, the art and science of breaking secret codes, underwent a similar and parallel course during history. Both fields evolved from manual encryption methods and manual codebreaking techniques, to cipher machines and codebreaking machines in the first half of the 20th century, and finally to computerbased encryption and cryptanalysis from the second half of the 20th century. However, despite the advent of modern computing technology, some of the more challenging classical cipher systems and machines have not yet been successfully cryptanalyzed. For others, cryptanalytic methods exist, but only for special and advantageous cases, such as when large amounts of ciphertext are available. Starting from the 1990s, local search metaheuristics such as hill climbing, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing have been employed, and in some cases, successfully, for the cryptanalysis of several classical ciphers. In most cases, however, results were mixed, and the application of such methods rather limited in their scope and performance. In this work, a robust framework and methodology for the cryptanalysis of classical ciphers using local search metaheuristics, mainly hill climbing and simulated annealing, is described. In an extensive set of case studies conducted as part of this research, this new methodology has been validated and demonstrated as highly effective for the cryptanalysis of several challenging cipher systems and machines, which could not be effectively cryptanalyzed before, and with drastic improvements compared to previously published methods. This work also led to the decipherment of original encrypted messages from WWI, and to the solution, for the first time, of several public cryptographic challenges.
Cryptology has long been employed by governments, militaries, and businesses to protect private communications. This anthology provides readers with a revealing look into the world of cryptology. The techniques used to disguise messages are explained, as well as the methods used to crack the codes and ciphers of encrypted messages. Readers will discover how cutting edge forensic science reveals the clues in the tiniest bits of evidence. A fact versus fiction section helps keep concepts rooted in known truths.
The first cultural history of early modern cryptography, this collection brings together scholars in history, literature, music, the arts, mathematics, and computer science who study ciphering and deciphering from new materialist, media studies, cognitive studies, disability studies, and other theoretical perspectives. Essays analyze the material forms of ciphering as windows into the cultures of orality, manuscript, print, and publishing, revealing that early modern ciphering, and the complex history that preceded it in the medieval period, not only influenced political and military history but also played a central role in the emergence of the capitalist media state in the West, in religious reformation, and in the scientific revolution. Ciphered communication, whether in etched stone and bone, in musical notae, runic symbols, polyalphabetic substitution, algebraic equations, graphic typographies, or literary metaphors, took place in contested social spaces and offered a means of expression during times of political, economic, and personal upheaval. Ciphering shaped the early history of linguistics as a discipline, and it bridged theological and scientific rhetoric before and during the Reformation. Ciphering was an occult art, a mathematic language, and an aesthetic that influenced music, sculpture, painting, drama, poetry, and the early novel. This collection addresses gaps in cryptographic history, but more significantly, through cultural analyses of the rhetorical situations of ciphering and actual solved and unsolved medieval and early modern ciphers, it traces the influences of cryptographic writing and reading on literacy broadly defined as well as the cultures that generate, resist, and require that literacy. This volume offers a significant contribution to the history of the book, highlighting the broader cultural significance of textual materialities.
