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The American Black Chamber (Bibliographies of Modern Authors,) by Herbert Yardley Average Customer Review:  Paperback (01 November, 1989) list price: $28.80 -- our price: $28.80 (price subject to change: see help) US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Reviews (3)
Yardley was an egotist, and never hesitated to take first personcredit for work actually performed by subordinates, according to people whoknew him. In any case, it makes a great read!
Isbn: 0894121545 |
$28.80 |
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The Codebreakers : The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn Average Customer Review:  Hardcover (05 December, 1996) list price: $70.00 -- our price: $44.10 (price subject to change: see help) US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Editorial Review "Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could invent a cipher that no one could break," writes David Kahn in this massive (almost 1,200 pages) volume. Most of The Codebreakers focuses on the 20th century, especially World War II. But its reach is long. Kahn traces cryptology's origins to the advent of writing. It seems that as soon as people learned how to record their thoughts, they tried to figure out ways of keeping them hidden. Kahn covers everything from the theory of ciphering to the search for "messages" from outer space. He concludes with a few thoughts about encryption on the Internet. ... Read more Reviews (24)
Yes, I found that, at times, the text gets bogged down in minutae that may not appeal to a particular reader, but in a volume of this magnitude, with this scope, and this ambition, that is virtually a lock. What many of the reviewers don't seem to realize that the book was written in the context of the 1960s and that not only the writing, but also events described must be put into context.David Kahn does an excellent job of doing just that.To illustrate, I might simply point out his portrait of Herbert O. Yardley.One only has to read Yardley's "Education of a Poker Player" to understand just how accurate Kahn was in describing Yardley and his role. Like all history books of a more specialized nature, there is a serious advantage to having enough background information to understand where events, people, and technology fit into the puzzle. If you are seriously interested in what went on "behind the scenes" in much of the historical events of the 19th and 20th centuries,this book provides information that is an essential part of the puzzle.
Isbn: 0684831309 |
$44.10 |
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The Code Book : The Evolution Of Secrecy From Mary, To Queen Of Scots To Quantum Crytography by SIMON SINGH Average Customer Review: Hardcover (14 September, 1999) list price: $24.95 US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Editorial Review People love secrets, and ever since the first word was written, humans have written coded messages to each other. In The Code Book, Simon Singh, author of the bestselling Fermat's Enigma, offers a peek into the world of cryptography and codes, from ancient texts through computer encryption. Singh's compelling history is woven through with stories of how codes and ciphers have played a vital role in warfare, politics, and royal intrigue. The major theme of The Code Book is what Singh calls "the ongoing evolutionary battle between codemakers and codebreakers," never more clear than in the chapters devoted to World War II. Cryptography came of age during that conflict, as secret communications became critical to either side's success.
Confronted with the prospect of defeat, the Allied cryptanalysts had worked night and day to penetrate German ciphers. It would appear that fear was the main driving force, and that adversity is one of the foundations of successful codebreaking. In the information age, the fear that drives cryptographic improvements is both capitalistic and libertarian--corporations need encryption to ensure that their secrets don't fall into the hands of competitors and regulators, and ordinary people need encryption to keep their everyday communications private in a free society. Similarly, the battles for greater decryption power come from said competitors and governments wary of insurrection. The Code Book is an excellent primer for those wishing to understand how the human need for privacy has manifested itself through cryptography. Singh's accessible style and clear explanations of complex algorithms cut through the arcane mathematical details without oversimplifying. Can't get enough crypto?Try solving the Cipher Challenge in the back of the book--$15,000 goes to the first person to crack the code! --Therese Littleton ... Read more Reviews (207)
Isbn: 0385495315 |
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Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, 2nd Edition by BruceSchneier Average Customer Review:  Hardcover (19 October, 1995) list price: $85.00 -- our price: $78.21 (price subject to change: see help) US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Editorial Review Cryptographic techniques have applications far beyond the obvious uses of encoding and decoding information. For Internet developers who need to know about capabilities, such as digital signatures, that depend on cryptographic techniques, there's no better overview than Applied Cryptography, the definitive book on the subject. Bruce Schneier covers general classes of cryptographic protocols and then specific techniques, detailing the inner workings of real-world cryptographic algorithms including the Data Encryption Standard and RSA public-key cryptosystems. The book includes source-code listings and extensive advice on the practical aspects of cryptography implementation, such as the importance of generating truly random numbers and of keeping keys secure. ... Read more Reviews (91)
The first quarter of the book may come as a surprise. It's not about encryption, it's about secure protocols. This is great stuff. It includes secure key exchange, where you and I can agree on an encryption key in a public conversation, but none of the other listeners know what we agreed on. It includes zero-knowledge proofs, ways of establishing authorization without releasing your identity. It includes lots more, as well. The next brief section discusses different modes for using encryption algorithms, key management, and other logistics. The third section is what you might have expected: detailed descriptions of many encryption schemes, taking up at least half the book. That includes public key schemes, private key codes, secure hashing algorithms, and all the other details needed for implementing the algorithms. One of the most useful subsections here is a set of pseudorandom number generators. It's not exhaustive, by any means - it omits the Mersenne Twister, for example. Still, it gives a fair set of algorithms, some of which are "cryptographically secure". That means the generator's output strongly resists attempts to find regularities, just the way a truly random sequence would. The last two chapters give a brief summary of the practice, legalities, and even culture around cryptography. This won't make you into a crypto professional. Despite its600+ pages, it barely introduces the world of crypto and certainly doesn't release anything from the "closed" world of government agencies. It will, however, give you useful algorithms, a basic background, and an appreciation of just what real crypto is about. That last may be the most important part. Too many people think inventing a good code is like making love: anyone can do it, and they instinctively do it better than most people. Wrong! Real crypto is not for dabblers, and this book gives some sense of what is involved. The first edition of "Applied Cryptography" was a landmark text, but the second edition is even better. It's so much better that, if you just have the first edition, you really should upgrade to the second, and I've never said that about any other book. ... Read more Isbn: 0471128457 |
$78.21 |
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Venona : Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Haynes, Harvey Klehr Average Customer Review: Hardcover (10 April, 1999) list price: $50.00 -- our price: $50.00 (price subject to change: see help) US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Editorial Review With this new volume, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr build upon their groundbreaking work inThe Secret World of American Communism and solidify their reputations as the foremost historians of Soviet espionage in America. In Venona, they provide a detailed study of how the United States decrypted top-secret Communist cables moving between Washington and Moscow. This account, based on information unavailable to researchers for decades, reveals the full extent of the Communist spy network in the 1940s. At least 349 citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents of the United States had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence agencies, among them Harry White (assistant secretary of the treasury in FDR's administration and the Communists' highest-ranking asset) and State Department official Alger Hiss, whose association with the Soviets had been hotly debated since the moment he was first publicly accused in 1948. "The Soviet assault was of the type a nation directs at an enemy state," write Haynes and Klehr. They go on to suggest that Venona's code-breaking "indicated that the Cold War was not a state of affairs that had begun after World War II but a guerilla action that Stalin had secretly started years earlier." Moreover, "espionage saved the USSR great expense and industrial investment and thereby enabled the Soviets to build a successful atomic bomb years before they otherwise would have." Haynes and Klehr deliver what is at once a real-life spy thriller and a vital piece of scholarship. A grand achievement. --John J. Miller ... Read more Reviews (13)
When the war ended, the Republicans began to investigate these rumors. Richard Nixon asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to assist. Hoover told him he could not let him view Venona because it was too important to the on-going Cold War vs. Soviet Communism, but that Nixon's instincts, particularly about Hiss, were right. Hiss was convicted. Numerous Leftists were convicted or exposed, as were many in Hollywood. When McCarthy went after them, the Left attempted to discredit him. Venona would have justified him, but Hoover refused to disclose Venona's secret. McCarthy was sacrificed and allowed to twist in the end, and for decades the Left proffered the lie that there were no Communists in Hollywood, the government, the Army or in America. After Ronald Reagan won the Cold War, Soviet archives were opened. Venona was discovered and became the Venona Papers. It verified that Hiss and all the accused and convicted Communists in Hollywood, the government, the Army and in America were in fact Soviet spies or "fellow travelers." One of those fellow travelers had escaped to Russia, but returned when the Statute of Limitations ran out. He returned to the U.S. in 1996. He was asked why. "To vote for Bill Clinton," he replied. Is further commentary really necessary?(...)
Unlike many such studies, this is well researched and utilizes not only US but also period Soviet sources. Highly recommended. ... Read more Isbn: 0300077718 |
$50.00 |
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Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945 by Leo Marks Average Customer Review: Paperback (12 September, 2000) list price: $17.00 -- our price: $11.56 (price subject to change: see help) US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Editorial Review At the age of 8, Leo Marks discovered the great game of code-making and -breaking in his father's London bookshop, thanks to a first edition of Poe's The Gold-Bug. At 23, as World War II was being played out in earnest, he hoped to use his strengths for the Allies. But Marks's urgent, witty memoir, Between Silk and Cyanide, begins with his failure to get into British Intelligence's cryptographic department. As everyone else on his course heads off to Bletchley Park ("the promised land"), he is sent to what his sergeant terms "some potty outfit in Baker Street, an open house for misfits." In fact, the Special Operations Executive's mandate was, in Churchill's stirring phrase, to "Set Europe Ablaze," and Marks's was to monitor code security so that agents could could report back as safely as possible. When he arrived, the common wisdom was that it was easiest for men and women in the field to memorize and use well-known poems. Unfortunately, since the Germans had equal access to the classics--"Reference books," Marks quips, "are jackboots when used by cryptographers"--Marks thought agents should write their own poems (or use his) instead, several of which are cheerily obscene. After all, no son or daughter of the Fatherland could ever know the rest of a verse that began "Is de Gaulle's prick / Twelve inches thick," and continued on in a similar, shall we say, vein. But Marks soon felt that original doggerel was just as dangerous, since even slight misspellings could render messages indecipherable and risk agents' lives. His first solution? WOKs (worked-out keys) printed on silk. An operative would use one key, send the message, and immediately tear off the strip. Marks had a hard time proving that swaths of silk would save his people from swallowing their "optional extra," a cyanide pill. His efforts were dead serious, but often landed him in comic terrain. In one of the book's great set pieces, Marks visits Colonel Wills--surely the model for Ian Fleming's Q--in order to sort out the best ways to print his code keys. Before solving this minor problem (invisible ink!), Wills showed Marks several new projects--one of which involves an exotic array of dung, courtesy of the London Zoo. This gifted gadgetmeister planned to model life-sized reproductions of these droppings and pack them with explosives, personalized for all parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. "Once trodden on or driven over (hopefully by the enemy) the whole lot would go off with a series of explosions even more violent than the ones which had produced it," Marks explains. Despite such larky sentences and sections, the author never loses sight of the importance of his vocation, and Between Silk and Cyanide is as elegiac as it is engaging. Marks knows when to cut the laugh track, particularly as his book becomes a despairing record of agents blown--lost to torture, prison, the camps, and execution. Readers will never forget the valor of Violette Szabo, Noor Inayat Kahn, and the White Rabbit himself, Flight Lieutenant Yeo-Thomas. Poem-cracking, as Marks again and again makes clear, was far more than a parlor game. --Kerry Fried ... Read more Reviews (83)
The book presented a side of WWII that is not often heard--that of the courageous agents dropped into occupied territory to sabotage and to prepare the Resistance for D-Day.It was especially sad to note that often the author, while preparing them for deployment, knew that their capture by the enemy was imminent, because the enemy had already captured many of their comrades and was forging messages back to London in their names--however, Marks' superiors were unwilling to acknowledge this, for reasons which remain in debate to this day. I have to agree with many of the other reviewers on several points.Marks' wit, while humerous at times, does tend to get old by the end of the book.The author was unnecessarily vulgar at times, as well.In addition, it was sometimes tedious to wade through all the acronyms and code-names.
"Between silk and cyanide" includes plenty of humour of all shades, mainly dark, but don't read it for fun unless you are totally insensitive; it deals with harrowing events in harrowing times and I found it very upsetting on several levels.It would be wasteful to read it in a hurry just because you are a fast reader.This is a labyrinth of a book and there are many mazes of twisty little passages, all alike, that you very likely will miss if you are not careful. Heaven knows how many I myself skated over in my innocence. This is a large book, but that is not why it is not to be read at a sitting.Nor is the reason that it is hard to read; I had to stop repeatedly to rest and to digest (or recover from) the situations and implications described.I am not so sure how well I like the style, but it impressed me as true to life.It includes a great deal of oral boffinese, not the technospeak, but the throw-away witticisms that bubble up from the depths of overactive or overwrought minds.Boffins are not supposed to laugh at them because they understand them and non-boffins rarely do because they seldom enjoy them when they do understand them.The problem is that such wit is more irritating in the written than the oral medium.After all, most of such cracks are tasteless or trivial.In other respects the writing itself is clear, natural, and far more literate than most wartime reminiscences.Mind you, Marks, intelligent and compelling as he is, is no John Masters or R. V. Jones, but then, comparison with such would set unrealistic standards for anyone.Be all that as it may, the sheer tragedy of the times repeatedly yielded nightmares painful to a reader conditioned to quips."... I found myself staring into eyes full of dead pilots."If you really want to understand the intensity of the hurt or the nausea of such remarks, read the book. On technical and historical matters also, this book is of interest at several levels.On one hand it repeatedly amazes one with the brilliance of some the work they did, and on the other it leaves one breathless at some of the things they apparently struggled to achieve.To anyone with modern computer experience, the idea of having difficulty in designing a letter-based one time pad surely must be totally bemusing; am I too blasé because of long occupational exposure to the concept of arbitrary radix arithmetic?I am not stupid enough to think that I would have done any better in their place at that time, but I still do not quite know what to make of this.Several other cryptographic inventions discussed (but not all) are pretty trivial in terms of information theory, which is puzzling in the light of the highly non-trivial minds that are generally known to have been employed in the field at that time.Also, there are non-cryptographic technical details that I should have loved to discuss.For example, in a period of desperate austerity the insistence on printing agents' reference material on silk puzzles me.The justification was that silk fabric was easy to burn and to conceal in clothing.I should have thought that treating rayon or even very fine cotton with nitrocellulose would have been cheaper and more effective. But I don't know the real-life situation.I wish I did. But not at first hand, thank you. Marks himself was an unusual, brash, understandably not very modest, and clearly insecure young man, and he conveys his unusualness with a clinical wryness that spares neither himself nor anyone else.He is too skilled to leave me convinced that he is artless in every word he writes about himself, his favourites or his unfavourites, but if his story is substantially imaginary, this book is one of the greatest works of art of the twentieth century.If you disagree, try reading any (and I mean ANY) fictional blockbuster of comparable size and themes, whether historical romances or hard fiction, and try to find one that carries anything like the same conviction.Don't hurry to call me to compare notes.For my part I accept the book at face value as reminiscences from a retentive memory, supported by notes, slanted by personal perspective, and eroded by time.One can hardly demand better than that, especially in the light of the nauseating closing chapters, the loss of history and the closing in of the janitors and the of the vultures and parasites after the fray.As I read it, the book is a striking work dealing with arresting material, and it is absorbing, though heartbreaking, material to read. ... Read more Isbn: 068486780X |
$11.56 |
Room for improvement
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Handbook of Applied Cryptography by Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. Van Oorschot, Scott A. Vanstone Average Customer Review: Hardcover (16 October, 1996) list price: $99.95 -- our price: $87.31 (price subject to change: see help) US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Reviews (16)
If you don't have a ton of mathematical background and are scared of having to take a crash course in number theory, or are looking for a higher level view of things, I'd suggest something more along the lines of Bruce Schneier's 'Applied Cryptography' (ASIN 0471117099). If you have some mathematical background, but want to get into things in detail, this is probably for you. If you're not sure whether you'll like the book, you should definitely take a look at it. While Amazon currently doesn't have sample pages, if you do a Web Search on "Handbook of Applied Cryptography", you can find Sample Chapters hosted online to give you a good feel for the book's style. ... Read more Isbn: 0849385237 |
$87.31 |
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Computer Security Handbook by Seymour Bosworth, Arthur E. Hutt, Douglas B. Hoyt Average Customer Review: Paperback (September, 1995) list price: $100.00 US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Reviews (11)
Isbn: 0471118540 |
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Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier Average Customer Review: Hardcover (14 August, 2000) list price: $29.99 US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Editorial Review Whom can you trust? Try Bruce Schneier, whose rare gift for common sensemakes his book Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World bothenlightening and practical. He's worked in cryptography and electronic securityfor years, and has reached the depressing conclusion that even the loveliestcode and toughest hardware still will yield to attackers who exploit humanweaknesses in the users. The book is neatly divided into three parts, coveringthe turn-of-the-century landscape of systems and threats, the technologies usedto protect and intercept data, and strategies for proper implementation ofsecurity systems. Moving away from blind faith in prevention, Schneier advocatesswift detection and response to an attack, while maintaining firewalls andother gateways to keep out the amateurs. Newcomers to the world of Schneier will be surprised at how funny he can be,especially given a subject commonly perceived as quiet and dull. Whether he'sanalyzing the security issues of the rebels and the Death Star in StarWars or poking fun at the giant software and e-commerce companies thatconsistently sacrifice security for sexier features, he's one of the few techwriters who can provoke laughter consistently. While moderately pessimistic onthe future of systems vulnerability, he goes on to relieve the reader's tensionby comparing our electronic world to the equally insecure paper world we'veendured for centuries--a little smart-card fraud doesn't seem so bad after all.Despite his unfortunate (but brief) shill for his consulting company in thebook's afterword, you can trust Schneier to dish the dirt in Secrets andLies. --Rob Lightner ... Read more Reviews (112)
Isbn: 0471253111 |
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