Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Simon Singh's Crypto Corner

If you're a newbie on crypto, I can recommend Simon's Crypto Corner. Simon is author, journalist and TV producer, specialising in science and mathematics. He wrote some interesting books on mathematics and the history of cryptology.

The Code Book describes the complete history of cryptology, without going into technical details. Great book to get a view on how cryptography developed. There's even a free downloadable CD version from the book. You can try out letter frequency analysis on Vigenere, play with the Enigma internal etc. On the site's interactive Black Chamber, he explains all ancient and classical ciphers, how they are used, and how they were broken. You can also test your code breaking skils.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi,
Im very like to point out to the book review of Code Book by cryptologist James A. Reeds. It can be found at Review of Code Book. Its very critical in a sense of precious and thorough historical research and corrects of some err statements presented in this publication.