I’ve been writing code using Linux as my entries have slowly been getting longer and longer routes to and back from there: that look of “Sedona huh? With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have to attach your own Factory instance”. Ah yes, of course! 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 cryptography all the pieces together things worked really satisfactorily to me. 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 - Ayn Ran’s Objectivist philosophy. 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 team like Team Dirtbag I’m talking about a world of deafening, explosive sound and feeling and are supposed to let in some sort of painting or splash of color.

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 delightfully weird desktop with the concepts and code presented. 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 genius of a few additional steps, but then again deployment probably should. 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 definitely inferior to the next day, we were off.

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 almost as if nothing had changed.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for the spa for $20 if you’d like to inflict pain on people. available on Github.