The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography [Anglais] [Broché]

People love secrets. Ever since the first word was written, humans have sent coded messages to each other. In The Code Book, Simon Singh, author of the bestselling Fermat's Enigma, offers a peek into the world of cryptography and codes, from ancient texts through computer encryption. Singh's compelling history is woven through with stories of how codes and ciphers have played a vital role in warfare, politics, and royal intrigue. The major theme of The Code Book is what Singh calls "the ongoing evolutionary battle between codemakers and codebreakers," never more clear than in the chapters devoted to World War II. Cryptography came of age during that conflict, as secret communications became critical to both sides' success.

Confronted with the prospect of defeat, the Allied cryptanalysts had worked night and day to penetrate German ciphers. It would appear that fear was the main driving force, and that adversity is one of the foundations of successful codebreaking.

In the information age, the fear that drives cryptographic improvements is both capitalistic and libertarian--corporations need encryption to ensure that their secrets don't fall into the hands of competitors and regulators, and ordinary people need encryption to keep their everyday communications private in a free society. Similarly, the battles for greater decryption power come from said competitors and governments wary of insurrection.

The Code Book is an excellent primer for those wishing to understand how the human need for privacy has manifested itself through cryptography. Singh's accessible style and clear explanations of complex algorithms cut through the arcane mathematical details without oversimplifying. --Therese Littleton

In an enthralling tour de force of popular explication, Singh, author of the bestselling Fermat's Enigma, explores the impact of cryptographyAthe creation and cracking of coded messagesAon history and society. Some of his examples are familiar, notably the Allies' decryption of the Nazis' Enigma machine during WWII; less well-known is the crucial role of Queen Elizabeth's code breakers in deciphering Mary, Queen of Scots' incriminating missives to her fellow conspirators plotting to assassinate Elizabeth, which led to Mary's beheading in 1587. Singh celebrates a group of unsung heroes of WWII, the Navajo "code talkers," Native American Marine radio operators who, using a coded version of their native language, played a vital role in defeating the Japanese in the Pacific. He also elucidates the intimate links between codes or ciphers and the development of the telegraph, radio, computers and the Internet. As he ranges from Julius Caesar's secret military writing to coded diplomatic messages in feuding Renaissance Italy city-states, from the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone to the ingenuity of modern security experts battling cyber-criminals and cyber-terrorists, Singh clarifies the techniques and tricks of code makers and code breakers alike. He lightens the sometimes technical load with photos, political cartoons, charts, code grids and reproductions of historic documents. He closes with a fascinating look at cryptanalysts' planned and futuristic tools, including the "one-time pad," a seemingly unbreakable form of encryption. In Singh's expert hands, cryptography decodes as an awe-inspiring and mind-expanding story of scientific breakthrough and high drama. Agent, Patrick Walsh. (Oct.) FYI: The book includes a "Cipher Challenge," offering a $15,000 reward to the first person to crack that code.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Singh, Cambridge-educated physicist, has written a provocative study of code, the way in which humans hide the inherent meanings of messages by substituting words and or characters in a text. Author of the popular Fermat's Enigma, he broadly portrays the evolution of cryptography throughout the centuries. In essence, efforts of those wishing for secrecy and others who attempt to break it is a story of intrigue of the highest form. Employing a smooth narrative style, Singh tells of secrecy, fascinating events, and people, starting with Mary Queen of Scots and ending with recent attempts by quantum theorists to construct an unbreakable code. This is the history of technology at its best and serves as an excellent addition to David Kahn's mammoth work on cryptography, The Codebreakers (Scribner, 1996). Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries.
-ADayne Sherman, Southeastern Louisiana Univ., Hammond
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

During the late 19th century, private citizens and businesses began to rely less on the dependable but slow postal system, and more on a new method of transmitting and receiving messages, news and financial data. The breakthrough technology was the telegraph, and almost as soon as people started using it, they began to think of ways to safeguard private communications from prying eyes.

One writer in England's Quarterly Review described the problem in 1853: "The clerks of the English Telegraph Company are sworn to secrecy, but we often write things that would be intolerable to see strangers read before our eyes. This is a grievous fault in the telegraph, and it must be remedied by some means or other."

A simple solution to snooping telegraph operators was to encrypt messages before handing them over to transmit, a practice that became common for individuals and companies alike. A hundred years later, we are in the midst of another telecommunications transformation, and concern over privacy is more intense than ever. As our private e-mail messages and credit card numbers ricochet around the world at dizzying speed, encryption remains the cornerstone of our security.

Of course, as author Simon Singh explains in The Code Book, our methods of encryption have evolved along with our communications technologies. In a sweeping overview, Singh traces the evolution of secret writing from the time of Herodotus to the present day. Along the way, he tells tales of the treasonous, though simply coded communications of Mary, Queen of Scots; Louis XIV's Great Cipher, which went unsolved for two centuries; and Charles Babbage's 1850s deciphering of the supposedly uncrackable polyalphabetic Vigenere Cipher. He also details the World War II-era work of Navajo code-talkers and the cracking of the German Enigma machine, as well as the United States' and England's nearly simultaneous discovery of public-key cryptography in the 1970s.

Author of the 1997 bestseller Fermat's Enigma, Singh casts the relationship between codemaking and codebreaking in evolutionary terms: Like strains of infectious bacteria, ciphers grow stronger because, as the weak are deciphered, necessity demands that more difficult-to-crack codes take their place.

Although Singh fashions a compelling history, as well as a skillful explanation of the analytical underpinnings of cryptographs, the most dramatic moments in the book come in the last three chapters. As the book draws to a close, the author walks readers through such events of the past 20 years as the invention of public-key cryptography and recent experiments to employ quantum mechanics in the quest for the unbreakable code.

The public-key method - the first cryptographic system in history that doesn't require both parties in a transaction to share a secret key - is considered the most important advance in codemaking within the past 2,000 years. Public-key encryption makes possible familiar computer transactions like secure e-mail and e-commerce, without which using a credit card on the Web would be no more secure than leaving a wallet on the bus.

Public-key cryptography also helped revive a debate over encryption that pits citizen privacy against government security. As Singh commented at a recent book reading in San Francisco, "I could send you a message encrypted through free software on the Net, and the combined forces of the GCHQ, the NSA, the CIA and the FBI wouldn't be able to crack that code. And if they did manage to," he added, "I could just re-encrypt with Version 2.0."

Singh understands an essential truth about secrets: You can crack a code if you ask the right questions, but sometimes the answers evolve themselves out of existence. -- Maria De La O --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

His exposition is especially effective at putting the reader in the code breaker's shoes... --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

The ancient battle between people who want to preserve secrets and people who want to discover them proceeds as a form of evolution. Codemakers devise a better means of encryption; codebreakers solve it, forcing the encoders to find another improvement. Singh, trained in physics but now an author of works on science, spins an absorbing tale of codemaking and codebreaking over the centuries. Does the simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher, which replaces each letter of a message with a letter from a cipher alphabet, no longer suffice? Replace it with a code using two or more cipher alphabets. When that no longer outwits the cryptanalysts, encode with a Vigenère square, in which a plaintext alphabet is followed by 26 cipher alphabets. And so on through one-time pad ciphers, cryptographic machines and public-key cryptography.

Singh explains them all deftly. Looking to the future, he sees "one idea in particular that might enable cryptanalysts to break all today's ciphers." It is the quantum computer. If it can be built, "it would be able to perform calculations with such enormous speed that it would make a modern supercomputer look like a broken abacus." Or perhaps the cryptographers will triumph with quantum cryptography. "If quantum cryptography systems can be engineered to operate over long distances, the evolution of ciphers will stop. The quest for privacy will have come to an end." --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

For millennia, secret writing was the domain of spies, diplomats, and generals; with the advent of the Internet, it has become the concern of the public and businesses. One cyber-libertarian responded with the freeware encryption program Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), and Singh similarly meets a sharpening public curiosity about how codes work. His first popular foray into a mathematical topic, Fermat's Last Theorem (1997), nicely balanced technical detail with vibrant storytelling, a quality happily present again here. Although the quantum-mechanical encryption with which Singh culminates his narrative is challengingly arcane to most except for the math spooks at the National Security Agency, Singh successfully conveys its essential principles, as he does those of all major ciphering schemes. Beginning with such simple ideas as monoalphabetic substitution, which can protect the communications of a boy's treehouse club but not much more, Singh underscores with stories how codemakers and codebreakers have battled each other throughout history. A tool called frequency analysis easily defeats the monoalphabetic cipher, and encryptors over time have added the Vigenere square, cipher disks, one-time pads, and public-key cryptography that underlies PGP. But each security strategy, Singh explains, contains some vulnerability that the clever code cracker can exploit, an opaque process the author splendidly illuminates. Instances of successful decipherment, as of Egyptian hieroglyphics or the German Enigma cipher system in World War II, combine with Singh's sketches of the mathematicians who have advanced the art of secrecy, from Julius Caesar to Alan Turing to contemporary mathematicians, resulting in a wonderfully understandable survey. Gilbert Taylor --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

"It would be hard to imagine a clearer or more fascinating presentation. . . . Mr. Singh gives cryptography not only its historical dimension but its human one." --The New York Times

"Entertaining and satisfying. . . . Offers a fascinating glimpse into the mostly secret competition between codemakers and codebreakers."        --USA Today
  
"A good read that, bless it, makes the reader feel a bit smarter when it's done. Singh's an elegant writer and well-suited to the task of leading the mathematically perplexed through areas designed to be tricky."        --Seattle Weekly
  
"An absorbing tale of codemaking and codebreaking over the centuries." --Scientific American

"Singh spins tales of cryptic intrigue in every chapter." --The Wall Street Journal

"Brings together...the geniuses who have secured communications, saved lives, and influenced the fate of nations. A pleasure to read." --Chicago Tribune

"Enthralling...commendably lucid...[Singh's] book provides a timely and entertaining summary of the subject." --The Economist

In his first book since the bestselling Fermat's Enigma, Simon Singh offers the first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives. From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisitical breakthrough that made Internet commerce secure, The Code Book tells the story of the most powerful intellectual weapon ever known: secrecy.

Throughout the text are clear technological and mathematical explanations, and portrayals of the remarkable personalities who wrote and broke the world's most difficult codes. Accessible, compelling, and remarkably far-reaching, this book will forever alter your view of history, what drives it, and how private that e-mail you just sent really is.

Offers a peek into the world of cryptography and codes, from ancient texts through computer encryption. Singh calls the ongoing evolutionary battle between codemakers and codebreakers,never more clear than in the chapters devoted to World War II. DLC: Cryptography-History. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

"It would be hard to imagine a clearer or more fascinating presentation. . . . Mr. Singh gives cryptography not only its historical dimension but its human one." --The New York Times

"Entertaining and satisfying. . . . Offers a fascinating glimpse into the mostly secret competition between codemakers and codebreakers."        --USA Today

"A good read that, bless it, makes the reader feel a bit smarter when it's done. Singh's an elegant writer and well-suited to the task of leading the mathematically perplexed through areas designed to be tricky."        --Seattle Weekly

"An absorbing tale of codemaking and codebreaking over the centuries." --Scientific American

"Singh spins tales of cryptic intrigue in every chapter." --The Wall Street Journal

"Brings together...the geniuses who have secured communications, saved lives, and influenced the fate of nations. A pleasure to read." --Chicago Tribune

"Enthralling...commendably lucid...[Singh's] book provides a timely and entertaining summary of the subject." --The Economist

Simon Singh received his Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge University. A former BBC producer, he directed and co-produced an award-winning documentary film on Fermat's Last Theorem that aired on PBS's Nova series and formed the basis of his bestselling book, Fermat's Enigma. He lives in London.