The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

The mixed blessings of radio—ease of communication and ease of interception—were brought into sharp focus at the outbreak of the First World War. All sides were keen to exploit the power of radio, but were also unsure of how to guarantee security. Together, the advent of radio and the Great War intensified the need for effective encryption.

Marconi could soon transmit and receive pulses of information across distances of up to 2.5 km. He had invented radio.

Besides the intolerable destruction of ships, there was also a terrible human cost-50,000 Allied seamen died during the war.

So the race is on. The really important question is whether quantum cryptography will arrive in time to save us from the threat of quantum computers, or whether there will be a privacy gap, a period between the development of quantum computers and the advent of quantum cryptography. So far, quantum cryptography is the more advanced technology.

A nomenclator is a system of encryption that relies on a cipher alphabet, which is used to encrypt the majority of a message, and a limited list of codewords.

The letters a and l are the most common in Arabic, partly because of the definite article al-, whereas the letter j appears only a tenth as frequently. This apparently innocuous observation would lead to the first great breakthrough in cryptanalysis.

Al-Kindī’s technique, known as frequency analysis, shows that it is unnecessary to check each of the billions of potential keys. Instead, it is possible to reveal the contents of a scrambled message simply by analyzing the frequency of the characters in the ciphertext.

Despite the combined efforts of the Association, amateur treasure hunters and professional cryptanalysts, the first and third Beale ciphers have remained a mystery for over a century, and the gold, silver and jewels have yet to be found.

Diffie imagined two strangers meeting via the Internet, and wondered how they could send each other an encrypted message. He also considered the scenario of a person wanting to buy a commodity on the Internet. How could that person send an e-mail containing encrypted credit card details so that only the Internet retailer could decipher them? In bot