An epic tale on the history of encryption

Having felt so much joy from reading Fermat’s Enigma, I went straight to my next book by Simon Singh, The Code Book. This is a nonfiction book about the history of encryption. Honestly, my first take on this opening line was that it sounds a bit dry. I was familiar with the basic elements of modern encryption based on my work, and I couldn’t imagine how there could be so much to be told about it. Of course, I was dead wrong.

Encryption basically refers to the process of ciphering text so that it cannot be read by anyone who the text is not intended for. Although many people today might associate the word “encryption” with computers, humans have been encrypting text for as long as we had civilizations. One of the classical form of encryption is called the “Caesar cipher”, and it gets its name from the famous Julius Caesar, a Roman general from 100 B.C.

What The Code Book describes is the epic and very human tales of the continuous arms race between “codemakers”, who work to come up with secure forms of encryptions, and “codebreakers”, who try to find weaknesses in the state-of-the-art encryption system. These stories that are unraveled could not be farther from being dry. Perhaps it goes without saying that, any strong need to hide messages or to break someone’s hidden messages would almost always involve great historical tales.

The book offers great technical explanations

The book is not only great in its storytelling, but also in its explanation of the technical method of enciphering and how the codebreakers got to deciphering each of them.

One that I was particularly excited to learn about was the encryption and decryption of the German Enigma machine during WW2. This personally felt timely, since I had just watched The Imitation Game, a movie about Alan Turing’s contribution in breaking the Enigma, just a couple of months ago. The Enigma was by far the most difficult-to-break encryption in human history at the time, and I loved learning all the details of how it was made so unbreakable and how people went about breaking it. (Which were certainly details that the movie could not cover!)

Makes me appreciate encryption in my everyday life

Throughout history, numerous methods of encryptions were invented, and each of them were deemed “unbreakable” at the time. However, each and every time, people have identified weaknesses in these means of encryption. The arms race involved numerous countries, countless wars, various fields of studies, and many, many brilliant minds. Our trusty modern-day encryption methods are the direct product of this very arms race. Now that I have become familiar with the faces and stories behind it, I have a renewed appreciation for it as I face my computer. This is exactly why I love learning history! It gives me an elevated appreciation of the world I live in :)