The Code Book

by Simon Singh

book data

1,167 ratings, 4.17 average rating, 158 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		37%
4		44%
3		15%
2		2%
1		0%

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published

June 8th 2000 by Fourth Estate (first published 1999)

details

Paperback, 416 pages

isbn

1857028899 (isbn13: 9781857028898)

description

With their inextricable links to history, mystery and war, codes and ciphers offer a rich seam of material for any author. The relative dearth of non-…more

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Jun 06, 2008

Jim rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

bookshelves: pop-sci-geek

Read in January, 2005

recommends it for: Geeks and people who like geeks.

The Code Book is like geek porn. Explanations of the theories behind cryptography are woven together with anecdotes of times when code-making or code-breaking was integral to historical events. Singh strikes an excellent balance with this book. The clarity of his writing makes the explanations of the mathematics of cryptography very straightforward without dumbing them down, and the historical connections are always fascinating.

Personally, my favorite part was the section devoted ...more

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Jan 17, 2009

Jason rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

bookshelves: all-time-favorites

Read in February, 2009

i picked this up at my brother in law's house and started reading it, immediately went out and bought a copy....
wow...
what a FANTASTIC book...
mathematically oriented non-fiction that reads like an anthology of suspense stories...
highly enjoyable...

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3 comments

Oct 04, 2007

Chris rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

Read in February, 2008

Very fun! A mixture of puzzles (codes), math (very light) and history. It was a pretty easy read that can be done over a period of time.

Most interesting was tying the development of codes to actual historical impacts of codes, ciphers, codebreaking, and cryptology. Perhaps one of the best explanations of Diffie-Hellman and RSA techniques - very understandable!

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Apr 08, 2009

Jeremy Matters rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

bookshelves: good-stuff, non-fiction

Read in April, 2009

By carefully combining the technical details of the development of cryptography with a rich and fascinating description of the relevant historical context in which each major breakthrough occurred, Singh has managed a remarkable feat: he has created a piece of technical non-fiction that is a real page-turner.

In each chapter, he explores another aspect of the great battle between codemakers and codebreakers, creating suspense and tension, and simultaneously explaining how the process ...more

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Jun 22, 2009

Chris Herdt rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

Read in June, 2009

recommended to Chris by: Chassy
recommends it for: Anyone who wonders why HTTPS is secure

The main reason Chassy lent this book to me is for the chapter explaining asynchronous or public key cryptography, which makes secure communication over the Internet feasible. I had to read that chapter twice, but I am happy to say that I understand it now.

However, the rest of the book is pretty amazing too. The Beale Cipher is a fantastic story (and which I believe is a hoax, although you never know), and cracking the German Enigma machine is an important and often overlooked part o...more

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Apr 18, 2009

Islefaye rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

bookshelves: computers, library, other

Read in April, 2009

excellent book for the geeky inquiring mind. Goes from the methods used to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, to other key historical stories involving broken ciphers and the military applications and work done on codes and code breaking by brilliant minds in the field of cryptology. Moves on to the internet era with good explanations of encryption methods for the masses and how the extraordinary minds of the geeky minded civil libertarians who believe in privacy for the average person (the masses...more

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Jan 29, 2010

Jfk rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

Read in February, 2010

This is truly an interesting book. Especially if you are a geek. Singh clearly follows the major developments in encrypting and decrypting information over time. The methods are clearly explained and a lot of back ground is provided on some of the interesting characters that contributed to the art over time. A computer programmer cannot help but read this book and start thinking about program to break the various codes. Just when you feel really good about it, then you get to modern computer...more

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Apr 28, 2009

Bryce Holt rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

Read in September, 2005

Prepare to dork out with your bad self, because this book is for those of us who A) Had a code dial as a kid (like Ralphie in "A Christmas Story"), and B) Didn't get laid until at least college. The truth is, though, that Simon Singh's "The Code Book" rocks the pants. This guy's knowledge and history is astounding, and while much of it is beyond me to fully understand, I am enamored with the way the stories unravel.

Enjoyably crafted and with the lay reader in ...more

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Jul 07, 2008

fbuser1258350672 rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

This is by far one of the most incredible books I've ever read.

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Sep 11, 2009

Thomas Holder rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

Read in September, 2006

A continuation of Douglas Adams' briliant Hitchhikers guide. It's much the same as before, which is in no way shape or form a bad thing. We're offered the same brilliantly silly sci-fi that Adams nailed with his first in the trilogy of five and I found myself getting to know the characters a bit better and also there were deepers emotions that Adams uncovers within the characters. Poor Arthur Dent, an uncountable distance from home, riddled with a feeling of melancholy and just generally miserab...more

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Dec 02, 2008

Eric_W rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

bookshelves: current-affairs

Read in January, 2000

Singh, author of Fermat's Enigma, has even included a code to practice one's deciphering skills on. The successful cryptanalyst will win $15,000. In the appendix, he discusses other famous attempts at breaking codes, including the recent book, The Bible Code, by Michael Drosnin. This work caused quite a stir a couple of years ago when Drosnin, building really on the work of several Hebrew scholars, claimed to have discovered several prophecies hidden in the text of the Bible, a forecas...more Singh, author of Fermat's Enigma, has even included a code to practice one's deciphering skills on. The successful cryptanalyst will win $15,000. In the appendix, he discusses other famous attempts at breaking codes, including the recent book, The Bible Code, by Michael Drosnin. This work caused quite a stir a couple of years ago when Drosnin, building really on the work of several Hebrew scholars, claimed to have discovered several prophecies hidden in the text of the Bible, a forecast of the assassination of the Kennedys and of Anwar Sadat. The Biblical code was an EDLS (equidistant letter sequence) code, where you take any text, pick a particular starting letter and jump ahead a given number of letters to spell out a sentence.

As critics have pointed out, any large text will produce all sorts of things. Brendan McKay at the Australian National University used Drosnin's technique to search Moby Dick and discovered similar predictions of assassinations that have occurred. Hebrew texts, Singh notes, are particularly rich in EDLSs because Hebrew has no vowels, which means interpreters can insert vowels as they see fit. Codes are constantly evolving; as code breakers break them, new ones must be developed. The supposed one-time pads, as in the Cryptonomicon, even had weaknesses — for example, if used more than once or from patterns inadvertently created by typists, patterns being the entry into most ciphers. Cryptanalysis, or the process of code breaking, was really invented by Islamic scholars in the 19th century. Substitution ciphers, where another alphabet is substituted for the original, were believed to be unbreakable; there were so many possible combinations of 26 letters that it would take billions of years to test all of them.

The Islamic scholars, while analyzing the Koran, discovered that the frequency of letters was not the same. In English, for example, the letter 'e' appears much more frequently than 'z' By analysis of letter frequency and knowing the language of the cipher, deciphering became quite simple. Blaise de Vigeniere solved this weakness by inventing the Vigeniere square, which provided multiple cipher alphabets using keywords to link letters with particular alphabets, a polyalphabetic cipher. The beauty of his scheme was that the letter “e” might be represented by several other letters, so frequency became irrelevant C or so everyone thought. To decipher the code, all one needed was the keyword, easy to remember, and not necessary to write down anywhere. Deciphering was a tedious process, however, and his impregnable ciphering system was not widely used. The Great Cipher was created by a father and son team working for Louis XIV. Their system was to use a combination of various types of ciphers. Unfortunately, they died without recording how their cipher worked, and many documents in French archives remained completely unreadable until the late 19th century when a French cryptanalyst spent several years painstakingly applying his knowledge of ciphers to the problem. Several of the documents thus finally deciphered revealed the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask.

Charles Babbage, inventor of the modern calculator and computer, was the one who broke Vigeniere's polyalphabetic system, by using statistics to create an algorithm that helped reveal the keyword. The problem in the twentieth century has not been the development of undecipherable ciphers. The computer makes encoding very easy and quite unbreakable. But each ciphered message can only be deciphered using a key. The recipient has to know the key. Banks would hire messengers to deliver keys to encrypted messages that needed to be sent from one bank to another. That proved to be a bureaucratic nightmare, and as the Internet created a need for encrypted messages between individuals and online stores or other persons, the deliverer of the key became very important. Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkle, and Whitfield Diffie decided the problem was not insoluble. As Hellman said, “God rewards fools.”

Only a fool would be willing to work on a problem for which the experts had said there was no solution, and to be willing to keep getting excited by an idea only to have it flop, then try another. Their solution was unique. They eliminated the need for key exchange. Just how they did this is marvelous in its simplicity, but if I told you you wouldn't need to read the book, which is what I heartily recommend. PQP, the cipher made public so that anyone could use it, made the government nervous and civil libertarians and others in favor of privacy leap for joy. Now anyone could encrypt a message with total security. We hear constantly about the worry that the NSA, CIA, and others in government have about the easy ability of ordinary people to have a level of encryption that is indecipherable. But, of course, it=s in their interest to make everyone think they have an indecipherable message, so my guess is that those agencies already know how to break the unbreakable codes but just don't want anyone to know they can. (less)

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Dec 27, 2007

Taka rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

bookshelves: 2-nonfiction-you-must-read, japan_jul07-present, popular-science

Read in December, 2007

Awesome--

Simon Singh's provocatively titled The Code Book goes through the history of cryptography from, well, ancient times to the present day, explaining all the major ciphers ever invented and how they impacted the course of of general history, including Mary Queene of Scots, World War II, and privacy in the Age of Information. It is simply fascinating. Simon Singh is very good at elucidating the complex and complicated concepts of cryptography for laypersons, and consequently the...more Awesome--

Simon Singh's provocatively titled The Code Book goes through the history of cryptography from, well, ancient times to the present day, explaining all the major ciphers ever invented and how they impacted the course of of general history, including Mary Queene of Scots, World War II, and privacy in the Age of Information. It is simply fascinating. Simon Singh is very good at elucidating the complex and complicated concepts of cryptography for laypersons, and consequently the book is very, very readable on top of being just exciting to read about the age-old battle between codemakers and codebreakers. A codemaker comes up with a cipher or a code, claims it unbreakable until some genius makes a breakthrough and proves the codemaker wrong. This pure intellectual battle between fundamental human desires - secrecy/privacy and curiosity - spanning over two millennia is a sheer joy to read about.

One of the most fascinating topics was the problem of key distribution and its solution. Briefly put, any cipher needs a key to encrypt and decrypt a message (called "plaintext"). Imagine Taka sending an encrypted message to Mom. Upon receiving the message, Mom needs to know two things: what kind of cipher Taka used to encrypt it, and a key to decrypt it. To use Mr. Singh's analogy, Taka sends Mom a letter in a safe with a padlock. If Mom doesn't have the key to the padlock, she can't open it and read the letter. So it seems that Taka has to send Mom the key to the padlock as well, perhaps via some secure route like courier. Even if assuming that using courier is perfectly secure, it still poses a practical problem: if Taka wants to send letters to all his friends, does he have to employ courier for all of his friends to send the key? That would be very expensive indeed. And what if courier gets intercepted?

But there is a way to entirely do away with the problem, and it's brilliant. Without even sending the key, Taka can be assured that his letter in the safe is read only by Mom. How? Read the book and find out.

(less)

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May 18, 2007

Raghu rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

Read in April, 2002

Ever since I read Simon Singh's 'Fermat's Enigma', I had put him down as one of my favorite authors of popular science writing. This book does full justice to that faith. It is a very readable and enjoyable book on the difficult subject of cryptography.
Singh starts out with the details of how Mary Queen of Scot's got beheaded due to her coded messages being de-crypted by Queen Elizabeth's code breakers. Then there is the lovely presentation of the details of the German Enigma machine bein...more

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Nov 12, 2008

Rowland rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

bookshelves: non-fiction, science

Read in September, 2009

An excellent read. I never realised how far back encryption went and how interesting it’s history (present and future) can be.

Mary Queen of Scots undoing was weak encryption. World War II’s allied victory is attributed to the information received through the breaking of the Enigma code. Treasure apparently buried in the USA with the location encrypted and published in the Beale Papers (yet to be decrypted). Today we are all indebted to cryptographers who developed DES and RSA en...more

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Mar 07, 2010

Nathan rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

bookshelves: science-fact

Read in March, 2010

As with Singh's other books, this is very easy to read, very interesting, and accurate. I took cryptography in classes at university and it was deadly dull compared to this. Singh tells the story chronologically, but illustrating each period with as many stories, anecdotes, and asides as he can. The result is a colourful, fascinating, and highly recommended book.

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Apr 24, 2009

Jessica rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

Read in April, 2009

This book was fascinating, and the author did an incredible job of simplifying technical details so that they made sense. There were all sorts of cool stories from history. I would have actually enjoyed European history if they had told us stories like the one in this book about Mary, Queen of Scots. I also loved the part about the Navajo wind talkers.

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Sep 10, 2009

melydia rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

Read in September, 2009

A history of cryptography from ancient Egypt through quantum computing. My favorite parts were about WWII, with Turing and the Navajo Codetalkers. Some parts were a touch slow - cryptography isn't nearly as thrilling as the activities associated with it - but by and large it was an informative read. My only real complaint was how long it took me to read. Though Singh's text was thorough and readable as ever, it took me nearly a month to finish. I think I just wasn't in the right mood for a ...more

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Feb 15, 2010

Michael added it (review of isbn 0385495323)

Read in February, 2010

Singh discusses cryptography and codes from the earliest known examples to the modern day. (Modern as of 1999, at least). A good overview. The section on Enigma was particularly good--if a temporal rift ever transports me back to WWII, I'll be able to help the Allies break the German code right away!

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Dec 26, 2009

Keith rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

This is a popular science book about codes and code breaking. If this is the sort of thing that interests you, and you have no real knowledge about such things - then this should be your first port of call. Simply awesome. I seldom read books more than once but I hit thrice with this one!

Pip pip.

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Dec 30, 2009

Bruce rated it:

(review of isbn 0385495323)

Read in December, 2009

An entertaining, quite fascinating, informative, and I assume fairly thorough history of the ongoing arms race between people who want to keep secrets and the people who want to read them. I had some difficulty with some of the problems posed at the end of the book. ;-)

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