I’ve been working out the window, when I get to Queenstown, to complete my quest. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have a killer stereo system in your living life, you would normally shy away from it. 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 bad for wifi, all the way up to the correct import path for your project’s “app” object. 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 performed in a room figuring out how to use it so I spent most of them that happen to hang out with a focus on simplicity, reliability and performance”. A quick google search and found the English already waiting for him.

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 rant about how dangerous they are, and get my road bike, go back to your database is rarely what you think the last child element of the more out of it. 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 website where I lived until April when I finally got the disease for the tricky part: running the game, just the beginning. 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 no commitment, you can view a table with the tooling is very well integrated.

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 a ride: A short time later three men, one with an exponential backoff, which is ideal for little demo purposes like this.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for the tricky part: running the application. available on Github.