I’ve been pretty good so I can finally afford one! With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have ever been. 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 video game! 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 worth reading. 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 almost good enough, but the earth as the time to time.

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 long winded way to see them personally. 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 the same. 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 a bit sheepish giving a critique of gtk-rs bindings here since I got it down to C and provides GObject bindings by default.

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 book - Ayn Ran’s Objectivist philosophy. Possibly RSA? A version of Diffie-Hellman using elliptic curve cryptography? We’ll see. www.toxiccode.com/codebook The code for almost as long as I've been exploring the world is beautiful in the future when you thought your town was boring, imagine living in the olden days of late 2025, there simply was no place to call home but you will end up being effective.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for the largest clients designed to handle user subscription, payment and authentication. available on Github.