The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy From Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

Contents
Chapter 1: The Cipher of Mary Queen of Scots
Chapter 2: Le Chiffre Indechiffrable
Chapter 3: The Mechanisation of Secrecy
Chapter 4: Cracking the Enigma
Chapter 5: The Language Barrier
Chapter 6: Alice and Bob Go Public
Chapter 7: Pretty Good Privacy
Chapter 8: A Quantum Leap into the Future
The Cipher Challenge
Appendices
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Further Reading
Codes have decided the fates of empires, countries, and monarchies throughout recorded history. Mary, Queen of Scots was put to death by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, for the high crime of treason after spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham cracked the secret code she used to communicate with her conspirators. And thus the course of British history was altered by a few sheets of cryptic prose. This is just one link in humankind's evolutionary chain of secret communication, and just one of the fascinating incidents recounted in The Code Book, written by bestselling author Simon Singh.
Combining a superb storyteller's sense of drama and a scientist's appreciation for technical perfection, Singh traces the evolution of secret writing from ancient Greek military espionage to the frontiers of computer science. The result is an epic tale of human ingenuity, with examples that range from the poignant to the peculiar to the world-historical.

There is the case of the Beale ciphers, which involves Wild West escapades, a cowboy who amassed a vast fortune, a buried treasure worth $20 million, and a mysterious set of encrypted papers describing its whereabouts--papers that have baffled generations of cryptanalysts and captivated hundreds of treasure hunters.