It’s a Book About Code, no not that Kind of Code
While this book is titled “The Code Book”, it is not about computer science. It’s about a different type of science; “the science of secrecy”. How to hide messages and meaning, It’s about cryptography.
The Code Book by Simon Singh is a 400-page book covering the history of cryptography, from it’s infancy up to the public knowledge of where the field is today. Now, this wasn’t my first read through of the book but, I figured I’d have another go at it after my interest in cryptography was peaked by some elliptic curves.
Overview of the Book
The Code Book begins with a bit of royal drama. Queen Elizabeth had imprisoned her cousin Mary Queen of Scots on a plot to kill her. The only thing protecting Mary was that she had encoded all of her messages with her possible conspirators. Once we’re drawn in with a bang Dr. Singh deftly stops just as the story gets interesting and shifts to cover the ancient history of codes. He explains hidden codes, the development of the first ciphers, how the basics of encoding a message work and gives us some Egyptian and Roman codes. Next up he tells us of how those codes were broken by resourceful Arab cryptoanalysts. This sets up a familiar battle that we will see through the book, the cryptographer vs the cryptoanalyst. Chapter one concludes by returning to the story of Queen Mary and her fate.
The Bombe, used to crack the German Enigma machine in WW2
A model of the German Enigma machine
Chapter two begins with a new cipher, and the professional development of cryptoanalysts all over Europe but soon builds to some truly remarkable cryptoanalytical developments. The next two chapters are devoted to the development of mechanical means to implement cryptography like the enigma machine, along with the fight by cryptoanalysts to break this new measure of security. A break from cracking secret messages is taken in chapter five as the book explores the problem of cracking the secrets of lost languages, like the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Chapter 6 and 7 bring this discussion of cryptography into the digital age to explain what currently underpins our connected world and keeps our credit card info safe while buying stuff online. Finally, chapter 8 concludes with some speculation about where cryptography will be going in the future. Hint, it involves the ever popular prefix quantum.
The Code Challenge and Appendix
Most of the time when a book has an appendix, it’s often not worth talking about. The Code Book bucks this trend. First, we get a set of 10 coded messages that we can decipher. There was a reward when this book came out for the first person to decipher them all, but that has been claimed. In the appendix, we dive deeper into the codes we learned about through the book. Instead of just talking about them and maybe giving a simple description, this section goes through different ciphers and the actual procedures behind setting up coded messages. I highly recommend you at least skim through this part.
A Look Back 20 Years Later
When I read older books that give some expectations about the future, I like to see how their predictions did. With aerospace engineering books like Kelly: More than my share of it all , it was relatively easy as it’s in my field and I’m already aware of some of the nuances. With cryptography, on the other hand, I must admit to being a complete novice. I do know that between the release of the book and now, there has been a bit of a shift to elliptic curve cryptography.
As a technical website, I try to avoid the political, but I feel it would be an injustice not to touch upon the topical political changes that have happened. This book predates the global war on terror and the mass surveillance brought about by the PATRIOT Act so there’s much too much to cover in a single post so I’m hoping to take a very bird’s eye view by linking to other articles. The Atlantic has a piece about the buoying of the NSA in the age of modern communication. That piece was written about in 2012 and here is a wiki page covering disclosures from 2013 to the present. While these articles on the rise of the modern surveillance state does not deal directly with cryptography, they give an interesting look into what the actions of the cryptoanalysts are and what approaches they are currently taking. Encryption has become widespread, and there are still conflicts between the government and the ability of the government to encrypt information.
As best I can tell, the world has indeed gone towards quantum cryptography, with China and the US being the dominant figures in the field. We still have not arrived at having public quantum cryptography (AKA outside of a lab), but I suspect we are on its doorstep. Here’s a two-year-old report on post-quantum cryptography. It’s rather brief and does not cover any math, but instead focuses on how quantum cryptography will change the encryption landscape of today.
My Opinion on the Book
Overall I quite enjoyed The Code Book . It peels back the history behind what is often a hidden science in a way that’s enjoyable. It does not lose the forest for the tree’s by going too deep into how different schemes work, but it gives enough of a taste of them that you get the main idea. In the end, I enjoyed this book enough that I picked up Hershey’s Cryptography Demystified, a cryptography textbook, to further explore my new interest in cryptography. I highly recommend The Code Book to any layperson, like myself, who thinks cryptography and how we keep secrets might be an interesting topic.
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