The Code Book
Naked links offer varying level of affordance on different platforms. I've frequently been on systems (or networks) in which following through on individual links is a pain. What's particularly annoying in this case is that Amazon's full links do include item descriptions (for books: the title) in them, though you'd have to click through to the links here, search the fucking title and then click on that link before you get what you're looking for: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743217349 fully expanded is: http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Wits-Complete-Story-Codebreakin... e12e's comment was…
I have always been intimidated by college level math and secretly wished I was smarter to not just understand, but to enjoy it as so many people seemingly do. I tried but failed to attain that level of proficiency multiple times. The mistake I was making was that I was trying to read lectures/blogs/books recommended by random people who knew nothing about me. It doesn't work. The thing is: math is big. It's HUGE, it's a whole world with something for everyone, and not everything in there excites me. I discovered this by accident by picking an easy and fun book about cryptography called (I…
I second Simon Singh's "The Code Book" and David Kahn's "The Codebreakers". If you're interested a good story about a one-man struggle to get British secret agents in WWII to start using reasonably secure codes (especially unbreakable one-time-pads), I recommend "Between Silk and Cyanide" by Leo Marks. A stronger version of the British double-transposition code that Leo Marks hated is the Soviet VIC cipher[0], which only has about 38 bit key strength, but is surprisingly strong for a pencil-and-paper method. For pencil-and-paper plus a deck of playing cards, there's Danial Shiu's…
Interesting that the book received praise from Ed Scheidt, who designed the cryptographic methods used in Kryptos. > This is THE book about code breaking. Very concise, very inclusive, and easy to read. Good references for those who would make codes, too, like Kryptos. That sounds like a strong hint that the book comes close to discussing the kind of code used in the remaining unsolved section, though if so I suspect Dunin would have realized it in the writing process. (Others have already attempted and failed to identify the cipher through the process of elimination.) For a good casual…
"They range in difficulty from simple to knotty and fiendish. We will let you know the answers next week." It's not a recruitment operation. They're just some fun puzzles which are accessible to laypeople. It shows the fundamentals of cryptanalysis in a way that a casual reader can understand and even have a crack at solving. Someone mentioned in another comment that Simon Singh's "The Code Book" starts in a similar way and they're dead on. You don't introduce someone to a subject by posing problems based on constructs they don't yet have the tools or context understand. The history of the…
This looks like it could have been inspired by the Cipher Challenge[1] from The Code Book[2], which starts with monoalphabetic substitution problems. 1. http://simonsingh.net/cryptography/cipher-challenge/the-ciph... 2. http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Book-Science-Cryptography/dp/...
It is just an article, not a book. And there exist a kind of balance between length of an article and amount of details. More details means, that article will be lengthy and harder to read. Ok, the most bold similaryty between both events is factoring a large number into perimes. You can find such task in every Cicada 3301 game. And you also can find it in puzzle, made by Julian Assange for 2004 Puzzle Hunt (Disc). It is obvious, that not everyone will find this a fun challenge. I doubt, that you can find such tusk in every other Melbourne Uni Puzzle Hunt, except for 2004. And I also think,…
Modular arithmetic is probably one of the coolest subjects we covered in high school, but we didn't spend enough time on it. I actually learned all about it from reading Simon Singh's The Code Book in sixth grade--it's a great introduction to cryptography and covers the basics of modular arithmetic to introduce RSA. Towards the end of high school, I decided to play around with graphing equations as colors. I came up with a bunch of cool patterns including pretty much all of the ones in the article--the easiest way to make a function well-behaved across a color channel is to make it mod 255.…
Backstory: Initially, I built a 2-hour treasure hunt with physical puzzles and real locations throughout my home city. Similar to an escape room, but outside. I had about 30 teams of 4-5 people that tried that, and most of them enjoyed the experience. After the pandemic hit, I wanted to see which part of the experience was the most important: puzzles, story, physical objects, real locations or the social aspect. So this game is an experiment to see if people enjoy only a subset of those. The cryptography puzzles came as an idea after rereading Simon Singh’s: “The Code Book”. Decrypting…
Simon Singh's The Code Book[1] is excellent, if around 10 years old: The Code Book covers diverse historical topics including the Man in the Iron Mask, Arabic cryptography, Charles Babbage, the mechanisation of cryptography, the Enigma machine, and the decryption of Linear B and other ancient writing systems. Later sections cover the development of public-key cryptography. Some of this material is based on interviews with participants, including persons who worked in secret at GCHQ.[2] [1] http://simonsingh.net/books/the-code-book/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Code_Book