This chapter is about a handful of people who made a business out of cryptography in the mid 1900s. Three…
Codebreakers chapter 12: Two Americans
The two Americans in question are Herbert Osborne Yardley and Wolfe/William Friedman. It is thanks to these two chaps that…
Codebreakers chapters 10&11: A War of Intercepts
I’ll be skipping over the WWI history in these two chapters to highlight what I think are the note worthy…
Codebreakers chapter 9: Room 40
Room 40 was the cryptanalysis section of the British Admiralty during the first World War. It has humble beginnings, but…
Codebreakers chapter 8: The Professor, the Soldier, and the Man on Devil’s Island
The chapter is about French cryptography in the years leading up to World War I. The spotlight was primarily on…
Codebreakers chapter 7: Crises of the Union
This chapter can be summarized as Cryptanalysis helps elect a President. The president in question was James A. Garfield. I…
Course notes: Cryptography I (Week 1)
Notes on the Online Cryptography Course from Stanford.https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/courses/OnlineCrypto/ Table of Contents What is cryptography about? Crash course in discrete probability…
Codebreakers chapter 6: The Contribution of the Dilettantes
Two big events that moved cryptology forward in the 19th century. First, the telegraph. And second, the collapse of the…
Distilled: How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document
In the oh-so-famous bitcoin white paper, Satoshi builds on the concept of a “timestamp server”. Since I have a lot…
Why should people care about surveillance?
That is one of the questions journalist Glenn Greenwald asked NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden during what appears to be the…
Codebreakers chapter 5: The Era of the Black Chambers
The 1700-1800s are an odd time for cryptography. On one had you have various governments setting up the oh so…
Codebreakers chapter 4: On the Origin of a Species
The species in question is polyalphabetic substitution. Though it took some time for its use to take hold, it was…
Codebreakers chapter 3: The Rise of the West
Why the 1300s? That’s generally around the time when the practice of a Country A sending people to Country B…
Codebreakers chapter 2: The First 3,000 Years
The first 3,000 years of cryptography were dark, spotted with faint, but distinct flickers of light representing the few breakthroughs…
Codebreakers chapter 1: One Day of Magic
The first chapter of this book is not like the others. Its purpose is to whet the user’s appetite for…
