Dive into the secret history of . . . secrets! Cryptology is the art and science of secret communication, and its purpose is to protect precious information and keep people safe. Learn about its building blocks: ciphers, codes, and keys. People have wanted to hide messages and important information for millennia. Read how history's coolest codes and ciphers have progressed from belts and sticks to rotating disks and supercomputers. Use your cryptology skills to design your own secret cipher. And learn about the smart people who built and broke the strongest secret systems.

Cryptography, the art and science of creating secret codes, and cryptanalysis, the art and science of breaking secret codes, underwent a similar and parallel course during history. Both fields evolved from manual encryption methods and manual codebreaking techniques, to cipher machines and codebreaking machines in the first half of the 20th century, and finally to computerbased encryption and cryptanalysis from the second half of the 20th century. However, despite the advent of modern computing technology, some of the more challenging classical cipher systems and machines have not yet been successfully cryptanalyzed. For others, cryptanalytic methods exist, but only for special and advantageous cases, such as when large amounts of ciphertext are available. Starting from the 1990s, local search metaheuristics such as hill climbing, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing have been employed, and in some cases, successfully, for the cryptanalysis of several classical ciphers. In most cases, however, results were mixed, and the application of such methods rather limited in their scope and performance. In this work, a robust framework and methodology for the cryptanalysis of classical ciphers using local search metaheuristics, mainly hill climbing and simulated annealing, is described. In an extensive set of case studies conducted as part of this research, this new methodology has been validated and demonstrated as highly effective for the cryptanalysis of several challenging cipher systems and machines, which could not be effectively cryptanalyzed before, and with drastic improvements compared to previously published methods. This work also led to the decipherment of original encrypted messages from WWI, and to the solution, for the first time, of several public cryptographic challenges.

A Classical Introduction to Cryptography: Applications for Communications Security introduces fundamentals of information and communication security by providing appropriate mathematical concepts to prove or break the security of cryptographic schemes. This advanced-level textbook covers conventional cryptographic primitives and cryptanalysis of these primitives; basic algebra and number theory for cryptologists; public key cryptography and cryptanalysis of these schemes; and other cryptographic protocols, e.g. secret sharing, zero-knowledge proofs and undeniable signature schemes. A Classical Introduction to Cryptography: Applications for Communications Security is designed for upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level students in computer science. This book is also suitable for researchers and practitioners in industry. A separate exercise/solution booklet is available as well, please go to www.springeronline.com under author: Vaudenay for additional details on how to purchase this booklet.

When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, it was woefully unprepared to wage a modern war. Whereas their European counterparts already had three years of experience in using code and cipher systems in the war, American cryptologists had to help in the building of a military intelligence unit from scratch. This book relates the personal experiences of one such character, providing a uniquely American perspective on the Great War. It is a story of spies, coded letters, plots to blow up ships and munitions plants, secret inks, arms smuggling, treason, and desperate battlefield messages. Yet it all begins with a college English professor and Chaucer scholar named John Mathews Manly. In 1927, John Manly wrote a series of articles on his service in the Code and Cipher Section (MI-8) of the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) during World War I. Published here for the first time, enhanced with references and annotations for additional context, these articles form the basis of an exciting exploration of American military intelligence and counter-espionage in 1917-1918. Illustrating the thoughts of prisoners of war, draftees, German spies, and ordinary Americans with secrets to hide, the messages deciphered by Manly provide a fascinating insight into the state of mind of a nation at war.

This book explains the decoding and encoding of messages in a clear way; among are the classic tales area the Zimmermann telegram, the Purple machine and Ultra.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Code-Based Cryptography, CBCrypto 2023, held in Lyon, France, during April 22–23, 2023. The 8 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 28 submissions. The conference offers a wide range of many important aspects of code-based cryptography such as cryptanalysis of existing schemes, the proposal of new cryptographic systems and protocols as well as improved decoding algorithms.

How should a free society protect privacy? Dramatic changes in national security law and surveillance, as well as technological changes from social media to smart cities mean that our ideas about privacy and its protection are being challenged like never before. In this interdisciplinary book, Chris Berg explores what classical liberal approaches to privacy can bring to current debates about surveillance, encryption and new financial technologies. Ultimately, he argues that the principles of classical liberalism – the rule of law, individual rights, property and entrepreneurial evolution – can help extend as well as critique contemporary philosophical theories of privacy.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th IMA International Conference on Cryptography and Coding, held in Cirencester, UK in December 2003. The 25 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on coding and applications, applications of coding in cryptography, cryptography, cryptanalysis, network security and protocols.