Book Review

The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography

By Simon Singh

I thought that this book was very informative on the early history of Cryptography. I felt that the book did a wonderful job of description and gave detailed insight into the world of early encryption. The representation of this early insight into the cryptography using several important figures from different cultures and ages was educational. It seems as if the author had two primary reasons for writing this book. First to chart the evolution of code and second to identify code breaking which goes hand in hand because if the code is broken it is no longer useful and another must be developed. This book was written for historians and also for those with knowledge of math and technical savvy.

The code book did go into someway of a detailed description into the lives of the individuals who were involved in encryption and decryption. There were three individuals that had great significant on encryption. Queen Mary of Scots who was receiving coded ciphers. In her holding place by her conspirators and these ciphers were intercepted and decoded by England’s foremost expert on breaking codes Thomas Philippe’s. One of Mary’s allies Gilbert Gifford was in fact a double agent. Who wrote a letter to Sir Francis Walsingham with a message "Whatever you order me to do I will accomplish" (Singh 39).

Gifford’s used a cipher that was not a simple mono alphabetic substitution, but rather a nomenclator consisting of 23 symbols that were to be substituted for the letters of the alphabet(excluding j, v and w) along with 36 symbols representing words or phrases (Singh 38).Thomas Philippe’s was a linguist of many European languages who also had extraordinary talents in forgery and he found it easy to decipher these transactions of letters. In Mary’s case the moral of this story is not to rely on technology of secret code and on the wrong people which got her caught, one must use brittle security to protect sensitive data.

Security must be holistic, Mary thought that no one would read her messages. The other important historical figure that I want to mention is German inventor Arthur Scherbius who was trained to be an engineer. Scherbius also understood electronics and he created what would become the most devastating invention in encryption history called the Enigma machine. Schreiber's invention has a number of ingenious parts which as with any machine could be understood if it were broken into its basic parts and rebuilt. ( T he basic form of Scherbius invention consists of three elements connected by wires: a keyboard for inputting each plaintext letter, a scrambling unit that encrypts each plaintext letter into a corresponding cipher text letter, and a display board consisting of various lamps for indicating the cipher text letter.)(Singh 127)

The German Army after having their encryptions decrypted by the enemy bought into using the Enigma Machine. In the late 1920's a failed German army soldier who also failed as a business man Hans-Thilo Schmidt was given a job by his brother Rudolph who was chief of staff of the Signal Corps which was the Enigma's command centre, this was the top secret location for handling top secret information. I assume that Schmidt was angry with the Germans for dismissing him because a soon as he got in there he started selling the secrets inside the machines and thanks to him everyone had a replica of the German army's Enigma machine.

This once again shows that you cannot trust anyone with sensitive information. I think that the author did a good job without any shortcomings, than again it depends on what the reader was expecting. This book can be used for information about the history of cryptography its advantages and disadvantages and to warn you not to trust anyone.

Bibliography:

Singh, Simon. The Code Book. New York:Broadway,1999.