Just Finished Reading
I’ve been interested in computer security for about 20 years
which was a little before actually using one. My initial fascination was with
hacking and such – both the doing and protecting against. Inevitably this sort
of bled into things covered in this slim volume – the protection of data and
the breaking of codes.
One of the most famous code breaking exercises is, of
course, the Enigma code which, arguably, shortened the war by at least 6-12
months. It’s interesting to speculate on what might have happened if we hadn’t
have broken Enigma. Just over a third of the book looks at historic codes such
as this along with exercises in code breaking you can try out – if so inclined.
Of course more modern ciphers leave Enigma standing in the dust with
increasingly long and complex codes. The authors explain public-key encryption
and how important encryption is in commerce and, as you may be aware, in quite a lot of
things we do on a day to day basic from getting our money out of an ATM to
making a cell-phone call. Encryption is almost invisibly everywhere.
I did find this book a bit of a slog and rather dry. It
might be the fact that it came across as rather text-book like – complete with
a significant number of exercises which honestly didn’t interest me that much.
These days cryptography is basically mathematics and unfortunately me and maths
haven’t been on talking terms for quite some time. Although I did learn a thing
or two I did have to dig around rather too much to excavate the nuggets of
knowledge. For me there was rather too much maths and it was all just a bit too
serious for my tastes. Maybe I’m not that much of a nerd after all.
5 comments:
I used to be totally into cryptography back when my brain worked better. I missed most of my basic training in the military because they kept pulling me out and testing my capabilities. After one particularly annoying test, the testers came out all excited after they'd graded everything and told me, "you broke a code that's not even a real language!" That was then, this is now. Now I just satisfy myself with puzzles.
If your life had gone along a different path you could be working for the NSA now...... [grin]
That was my original intent until I became disillusioned with the military and the government.
Have you read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon? Very good cyberpunk/alternative history on this very subject.
I haven't read it - but thought I'd bought a copy..... until I checked my book database....
I'll have to check it out. I've only read one or two of his I think. I liked them.
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