In The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, while not a comprehensive overview of cryptography, this masterful book by Simon Singh is a history of encryption, with a focus on the 16th century to the end of the 20th century. While the ISC 2 recently retired the cryptography domain and put it under Security Engineering, any topic with obscure terms such as hash function, public key cryptosystem, side-channel attacks and the like will certainly be intimidating. Reviewįor anyone who ever had to study for the CISSP certification examination, the cryptography domain was almost always the hardest and most intimidating of the ten exam domains. Sit back and be enthralled by the fascinating world of cloak-and-dagger spies, and how without strong cryptography, we wouldn’t have online banking, Amazon Prime, and other things that make life meaningful. Singh is a particle physicist who understands the science well and, more importantly in the case of this book, knows how to explain those details quite well. Department of Commerce categorized strong cryptographic tools the same way it did F-15s and M-16s (more about that in Chapter 7). How powerful are these cryptography tools? Until about only a decade ago, the U.S.

In The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, author Simon Singh reveals the often hush-hush world of the science of secrecy. But what’s clear is that there are plenty of times when it’s a matter of life and death to ensure that secrets remain undisclosed. It’s not clear who first uttered the quip: Of course I can keep a secret.

The Code Book by Simon Singh