The Code Book {ReadingNotes}

Histoire des codes secrets (The Code Book) by Simon Singh, translated from English by Catherine Coqueret - ISBN 978253150978 - Editions Jean-Claude Lattes 1999 note that the previous ISBN 0965073335 had no cover, edition might differ

Motivation

Birthday present from my father.

Pre-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain before having read the book.

Reading

• cryptography vs cryptoanalysis, constant arm-race
  • "Marie et Baington avaient fait confiance a un chiffre pour tenir leurs plans secrets, mais ils vivaient a une epoque ou la cryptographie perdait de son efficacite devant les avancees de la cryptanalyse" (p68 of the french edition)
  • see also my notes on Seedea:Research/Drive
• similarities between translation from ancient without knowledge of their meaning
  • see also my notes on Seedea:CoEvolution/HistoryIdeaManagement#CognitiveArcheology
• Babbage's inventor mindset
  • coherent with my previous notes Dean Keith Simonton's OriginOfGenius?
• Alan Turing brillance yet social difficulties
• nature of secrecy in the domain
  • thus difficulty of research which is generally based on public exchange
• potential link between
  • frequency analysis (comparing distribution of letters and/or words in a language) and
  • manifolds in Information Geometry (comparing probability distributions)
• evolution of cryptography
  • monoalphabet
  • polyalphabet
  • carre de Vigenere
  • le chiffre indechiffrable
  • key exchange, one way math function
  • quantum encryption without ear dropping possibility
• evolution of cryptoanalysis
  • analysis of frequencies
  • mechanisation
    • Alberti's disque a chiffrer/cadran
    • Rejewski's bombs
    • Turing's linked bombs
    • see also my notes on The Mechanical Mind In History
  • quantum algorithms to potentially crack RSA/DES

Tools

• Wikipedia:Secure Shell aka SSH
• rainbow tables
  • Wikipedia:Rainbow table
    • "a lookup table offering a time-memory tradeoff used in recovering the plaintext password from a password hash generated by a hash function, often a cryptographic hash function."
  • Free Rainbow Tables Distributed Rainbow Cracking (LM, NTLM, MD5, SHA1, HALFLMCHALL, MSCACHE)
  • Project RainbowCrack - Crack Hashes with Rainbow Tables
  • Church of Wifi WPA-PSK Rainbow Tables by The Renderlab
• PGP
  • The GNU Privacy Guard GNU project's complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC4880.
  • FireGPG Firefox extension under MPL that provides an integrated interface to apply GnuPG operations
• Off-the-Record Messaging distant messaging by providing Encryption, Authentication, Deniability, Perfect forward secrecy
• DistCrypt by Neohapsis Labs presented at Hacker Halted 2009
• IACR Crypto DB, searching in publications from Crypto, Eurocrypt, Asiacrypt, CHES, PKC, TCC, FSE, the Journal of Cryptology, ...

See also

• my own PGPPublicKey?action=source
• my notes on The Princeton Companion to Mathematics especially on number theory
• The Code Book on Simon Singh's official website
  • The Code Book on Wikipedia
• review by Artur Ekert at Cambridge CQC of The Code Book by Simon Singh concluding with "Probably the best book on the history of ciphers since David Kahn’s Codebreakers. Read it!"
• the recently discovered concept of Computational hardness assumption
• Algorithmic Cryptanalysis byAntoine Joux, Chapman & Hall/CRC 2009
  • Algorithmic Cryptanalysis Companion Website
    • contains hints and solutions to the exercises marked with an h in the book, programs available for download and various auxiliary material.
• A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) by Jeff Moser, Moserware September 2009
• related work as application of Wikipedia:Number theory
  • chapter 3 Applied Number Theory in Computing/Cryptography of Number Theory for Computing by Song Y Yan, (2nd ed.) Springer 2002
• quantum cryptography
  • Quantum Hacking group Breaking quantum cryptography
  • Quantum Cryptography and Possible Attacks 24th Chaos Communication Congress (24C3) 2007
• Treatment of Alan Turing was “appalling” - PM, Number10.gov.uk September 2009
• The LLL Algorithm
  • Lenstra–Lenstra–Lovász lattice basis reduction algorithm (LLL) according to Wikipedia
    • "polynomial time lattice reduction algorithm invented by Arjen Lenstra, Hendrik Lenstra and László Lovász in 1982"
  • The LLL Algorithm - Survey and Applications edited by Phong Nguyen and Brigitte Vallée, Springer 2010
• Algorithmic cryptanalysis by Antoine Joux, Chapman & Hall/CRC 2009 (with its companion website)
  • 2 Elementary number theory and algebra background
  • 10 Lattice reduction
    • 3 Higher dimensions
      • 2 Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovasz algorithm
  • 14 Elliptic curves and pairings
    • 1 Introduction to elliptic curves
• US National Cryptologic Museum NSA/CSS
• Theoretical Breakthrough for Quantum Cryptography, Technology Review: arXiv blog March 2010
• A Theory of Cryptographic Complexity by Manoj M. Prabhakaran at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IAS March 2010
• Algorithms vs. Hardness by Nisheeth Vishnoi at Microsoft Research India, IAS March 2010
  • announcement about the talk (as link to the page talk seems to be down) with high and low quality recordings
• The Enemy Within by Mark Bowden, The Atlantic June 2010
  • quoted regarding the MD6 paragraph
• China's secure communications quantum leap by Matthew Luce, Asia Times Online August 2010
• COPACOBANA, Cost-Optimized Parallel COde Breaker Special-Purpose Hardware for Code-Breaking
• Wikipedia:Elliptic curve cryptography
  • re-discovered through http://www.quora.com/How-secure-is-djbs-Curve25519
  • Curve25519: high-speed elliptic-curve cryptography D. J. Bernstein
  • to explore
• À l’attaque des codes secrets by Mathieu Cunche, Interstices March 2011
• Mathematics#OneWayFunction

Overall remarks and questions

• this? that?

Synthesis

So in the end, it was about X and was based on Y.

Critics

Point A, B and C are debatable because of e, f and j.

Vocabulary

(:new_vocabulary_start:) new_word (:new_vocabulary_end:)

Post-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain after having read the book. Link it to the pre-reading model and align the two to help easy comparison.

Categories

• Information

Other read books linking to the TheCodeBook page :

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