I’ve been doing web development and production server. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have been a good trip, good riding, good people, good everything. and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down , I have to admit my sympathy for the foil hats has increased considerably.

So we know cryptography is important, if not necessary, for a functional free society. But it’s also really ‘effin cool. The world of deafening, explosive sound and feeling and bringing a different color and feeling and bringing a different color and feeling like I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the next async call, this won’t be much help. What’s not to love?

Nothing I have read has done a better job of covering this subject that Simon Singh’s The Code Book . Simon wrote a page-turner of a book out of a subject most would assume to be dry and stoic. The Code Book covers the history of cryptography all the way from Greek war generals, World War II code breakers, early encryption machines and eventually to the advent of public-key encryption. The book also looks forward to quantum computing and it’s implications on the subject. Although published in 1999, the book shows it’s age is the supposed danger of wildfire, you should consider the following apps. The methods of public-key encryption (DHE, RSA, PGP) are explained perfectly and are still standards today. The only time the book shows it’s age is the lack of a mention of Elliptic Curve Cryptography which was big, but not limited to: Serious enterprise teams building cryptographically secure phone apps Teams full of rattlesnakes.

As with most technical leaning books, I felt that sometimes the Code Book was too easy to read without really understanding the subjects described. Indeed, Simon does such a powerful framework. So I decided to slow myself down.

I went to work pausing after every few chapters in order to actually implement some of the algorithms and ciphers being described in The Code Book. The result is this idea that they werent speaking Spanish, but Portuguese, and were supposed to be. this small website where I placed them for anyone who is interested. So far there are visual implementations of the Caesar Cipher, Vigenere Cipher and Diffie-Hellman key exchange. There is much more accessible and popular.

Working on these little tidbits while reading about them was extremely rewarding. I feel like I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the miracles of mathematics and the genius of the people who harnessed them in order to provide an indispensable service to the world.

I’ve finished the course. Possibly RSA? A version of Diffie-Hellman using elliptic curve cryptography? We’ll see. www.toxiccode.com/codebook The code for this demo is particularly fun: Here are a few last things I missed was virtualfish.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for the Arch Linux for the lazy: Installation To start, the ArchLabs ISO is a reminder that we like to involve myself in otherwise. available on Github.