Code makers and code breakers

I’m now reading The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography. Thanks, Iain!

I knew NONE of this stuff, but it sounded very interesting – and, just as I expected, an entire WORLD has been revealed to me. The world of trying to keep communications secret – and how codes have developed through the centuries. Different kinds of codes – from invisible ink to the Enigma machine. The race between the people who make up the codes – and the people devoted to breaking the codes.

Once a code is broken – it can no longer be used – so there is an entire industry of people (linguists, mathematicians, electronics wizards) devoted to creating a code that cannot be broken.

The entire Beale mystery was amazing. Never knew ANYTHING about ANY of this.

I love discovering an entire world, an entire industry – that I never knew existed. It’s like a veil being lifted back on how a certain slice of our world works. It goes back to what I was expressing in this post. No one can ever know EVERYthing – but stuff like this makes me feel like I can get a bit closer, or … a bit higher up in my perspective.

I’m not a math person, so much of the math in the book is very difficult for me to comprehend. Singh goes into how certain codes are constructed, and he includes in the book multiple ciphers to be decoded (to any reader who feels up to the task). My brain doesn’t really work that way – stuff like that always baffled me in school – I couldn’t comprehend where to even begin. I had a hell of a time with word problems, for example. COULD NOT GET THEM. I was good at geometry, and that’s about it. Algebra? Argh. Couldn’t get it. So much of this stuff is intensely mysterious to me and I have nothing but the deepest admiration for those who can look at a coded text, and start to break it down, figuring out the message beneath.

This entry was posted in Books and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

17 Responses to Code makers and code breakers

  1. David Foster says:

    Sheila…You might enjoy “Between Silk and Cyanide” by Leo Marks. At the age of 23, Marks became Codemaster for the British underground organization Special Operations Executive. He developed the codes and briefed the agents before they were sent out to occupied Europe..many of those he briefed, like Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan, did not return. The book can be read on two levels: a technical level dealing with the codes themselves, and a human level dealing with the agents and with Marks’ political struggles to do right by them.

    Some up the codes were based on the words to poems, many of them written by Marks himself. The code used by Violette Szabo was originally a poem written by Marks for his girlfriend (who was killed in a plane crash before he could give it to her):

    The life that I have
    Is all that I have
    And the life that I have
    Is yours.

    The love that I have
    Of the life that I have
    Is yours and yours and yours.

    A sleep I shall have
    A rest I shall have
    Yet death will be but a pause.

    For the peace of my years
    In the long green grass
    Will be yours and yours and yours.

  2. Dave J says:

    I absolutely need to read this book. My dad’s a part of this world, as I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before, and Walsingham features rather prominently in his small collection of 16th- and 17th-century engraved portrait prints.

    Like you, I am most definitely NOT a “math person.” Even before becoming a computer cryptology guy, my dad was, and still is, a musician (a bassist) and I wonder if a disproprortionate amount of the people in this field are of a musical inclination, since music and certainly musical notation is closer to pure mathematics than is spoken or written language.

  3. CW says:

    If you want to get really serious, read “Applied Cryptography” by Bruce Schneier. It is extremely technical, although not completely so, and is considered the “bible” of modern cryptography.

    Nowadays its almost all about processing power. A computer can rapidly try all possible combinations of characters in a substitution algorithm, rendering almost all ciphers useless except the ones based on pairs of huge prime numbers.

  4. red says:

    David – wow – fascinating!!

  5. red says:

    Dave J – very interesting, your comment about music.

  6. red says:

    CW – the book I’m reading right now is pretty much “code breakers for dummies” and even then I have to SQUINT sometimes to understand the mere structure of some of the codes.

    The Viegenere square, for example. It has been explained to me multiple times – with graphs – and highlighted diagrams – and I still can barely understand the concept.

    I do get that it’s important and kind of brilliant though!!

  7. red says:

    Sorry, I misspelled it (see, I can’t even get the spelling right!!) – it’s the Vigeneré Square:

    http://scard.buffnet.net/cipher/vigenere.html

  8. CW says:

    I have often heard that great codebreakers make great musicians and vice versa. I will certainly never be either.

    Red you make me feel bad that I have been a mental vegetable lately… I want to do some more research about Walsingham,as well as some stuff on the Holy Grail, etc etc, but the brain has just been stuck in neutral lately. I hope to snap out of it soon – Walsingham’s communications intelligence operations would be a great place to start.

  9. red says:

    CW –

    Well, if it makes you feel any better – your post about Francis Walsingham was one of the first things I thought of when I read about the trail of Mary Queen of Scots in this book – and how much an undeciphered bit of code factored into the final result of that trial –

    So you have spurred me on to learn more.

    Help me … is there a good biograhphy of Walsingham? He sounds ruthless. Terrifying – like, you do not want to be on this guy’s bad side. What an intellect. But I know nothing about him!

  10. red says:

    Oh and I would also say this: having Hurricane Wilma whirl through your life like a wrecking ball would make anyone a mental vegetable for a while. :)

  11. red says:

    David Foster – didn;t you write a post about Szabo? Am I imagining that? Her name sounds familiar …

  12. David Foster says:

    Yes…Violette Szabo

    also Noor Inayat Khan

    Actually, it’s thru the Leo Marks book that I first became familiar with the story of these two women and the other SOE agents.

  13. red says:

    David – photon PLAZA? Is “courier” no longer correct??

    Thanks for the links, though – I knew I had heard that name before.

  14. David Foster says:

    I use Photon Plaza for book reviews & other extended posts so they won’t take too much space on the Photon Courier page…I’m sure there’s a more sophisticated way to do it..

  15. CW says:

    Didn’t we have a discussion here before about biographies of Walsingham?

    There isn’t a really good biography of Walsingham – his tradecraft has confounded historians for centuries, so most who research him seriously eventually figure out that most of what they think they know may well be wrong, and they give up.

    The closest and best source I know of is “Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth” by Conyers Read, AMS Press, 1975. Hard to find, huge, dense, and more about other people affected by Walsingham than Walsingham himself. But about the best you’re going to do.

    One of my lifetime goals is to attempt to write one myself. It would be along the lines of “Sir Francis Walsingham and the Birth of Her Majesty’s Secret Service” or something like that.

  16. CW says:

    Holy crap – after that last comment I checked Amazon and Steven Budiansky just published the book I just said I wanted to write in August 2005… It has not gotten very good reviews, but I’ve already ordered it…

    It’s called “Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage”, found here:
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670034266/qid=1133836481/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-9418403-7293543?n=507846&s=books&v=glance

  17. red says:

    CW – Walsingham has indeed come up here a couple of times – mainly because of your posts.

    Argh – someone else wrote your book!!

    Well, there’s that OTHER book that you have to write – about your main passion – and I swear: i truly believe that you are the only man to write that book – so you’ve got to do it!! Do it before some jagoff beats you to the punch!

    I will order the book on Walsingham as well – i really want to learn more.

Comments are closed.