The Code Book: How to Make It, Break It, Hack It, Crack It by Simon Singh

By Simon Singh

It’s often called the technology of secrecy. Cryptography: the encoding and deciphering of non-public info. And it truly is history’s such a lot attention-grabbing tale of intrigue and crafty. From Julius Caesar and his Caesar Cipher to the code utilized by Mary Queen of Scots and her conspiracy to using the Engima computing device throughout the moment global battle, Simon Singh follows the evolution of mystery writing.

Accessible, compelling, and well timed, this foreign bestseller, now tailored for children, is certain to make readers see the past—and the future—in an entire new means.

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Additional info for The Code Book: How to Make It, Break It, Hack It, Crack It

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For example, when describing a person attempting to break a cipher, I have often used codebreaker rather than the more accurate cipherbreaker. I have done this only when the meaning of the word is obvious from the context. There is a glossary of terms at the end of the book. More often than not, though, crypto-jargon is quite transparent: for example, plaintext is the message before encryption, and ciphertext is the message after encryption. Before concluding this introduction, I must mention a problem that faces any author who tackles the subject of cryptography: the science of secrecy is largely a secret science.

Clearly the number of cipher alphabets generated by keyphrases is smaller than the number of cipher alphabets generated without restriction, but the number is still immense, and it would be effectively impossible for the enemy to unscramble a captured message by testing all possible keyphrases. D. Codemakers had evolved a system for guaranteeing secure communication, so there was no need for further development-without necessity, there was no need for further invention. The onus had fallen upon the codebreakers, those who were attempting to crack the substitution cipher.

No other letter in the table has such an asymmetric relationship with O. Each letter in the English language has its own unique personality, which includes its frequency and its relation to other letters. It is this personality that allows us to establish the true identity of a letter, even when it has been disguised by monoalphabetic substitution. We have now confidently established four letters, O = e, X = a, Y = i and B = h, and we can begin to replace some of the letters in the ciphertext with their plaintext equivalents.

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