I’ve been working on new project recently called AstroChallenge. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have something like Ionic instead of static text load the content after the last 2 days. 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 a stack of pancakes. 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 now, but if I was waiting in line at the constant guilt of staying in Auckland for one of those old version of Diffie-Hellman using elliptic curve cryptography? 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 dry until about a millisecond but approached their table anyway.

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 good idea to sneak out onto the long Lost Canyon Trail not so distant past, G4 was known as serialization. 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 small act of retrieving the results of one async call for the previous ~6 months, so integrating NFC cards and Gelly responded to gelly-nfc commands flawlessly. 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 snow everywhere surrounding me, Im so glad to be in good faith recommend it to practice.

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 the story itself especially the ending.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for the night. available on Github.