The Code Book
Simon Singh
82 pages read
While reading this book, I found ciphers especially interesting. Ciphers are when the letters in a message are replaced by other letters or symbols, while codes are when entire words are replaced. If you knew a bunch of ciphers, you could use them to communicate with your friends in secret, leaving notes on their lockers or notebooks, and no one else would be able to uncover them, unless of course there was a trained cryptanalyst (codebreaker) in our school. You could use ciphers as well as codes to hold meetings for clubs and such without having uninvited guests. I'd love to learn more about how exactly to break codes, but the book explains so much that I think that any more would make me an expert cryptanalyst.
Technical term: Vingère cipher (p. 48)
The Vingère cipher is a cipher that is almost impossible to break. It consists of each letter having twenty-six possibilities of being replaced, each letter of the alphabet. So, each letter could be represented 26 different ways. To make it easier for the intended receiver to break it, there is a keyword that is used. You take the keyword and repeat the letters as many times as there are letters in your text, and so each letter in the text that corresponds to a letter in the keyword gets coded by the cipher startingwith the letter in the keyword. For instance, suppose I was coding the letter 'P', and it matched up with the letter 'H' in the keyword, so I would use the alphabet starting with 'H' to code 'P'. Using this method, 'P' would be changed to 'W' in your text.
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Simon Singh
82 pages read
While reading this book, I found ciphers especially interesting. Ciphers are when the letters in a message are replaced by other letters or symbols, while codes are when entire words are replaced. If you knew a bunch of ciphers, you could use them to communicate with your friends in secret, leaving notes on their lockers or notebooks, and no one else would be able to uncover them, unless of course there was a trained cryptanalyst (codebreaker) in our school. You could use ciphers as well as codes to hold meetings for clubs and such without having uninvited guests. I'd love to learn more about how exactly to break codes, but the book explains so much that I think that any more would make me an expert cryptanalyst.
Technical term: Vingère cipher (p. 48)
The Vingère cipher is a cipher that is almost impossible to break. It consists of each letter having twenty-six possibilities of being replaced, each letter of the alphabet. So, each letter could be represented 26 different ways. To make it easier for the intended receiver to break it, there is a keyword that is used. You take the keyword and repeat the letters as many times as there are letters in your text, and so each letter in the text that corresponds to a letter in the keyword gets coded by the cipher startingwith the letter in the keyword. For instance, suppose I was coding the letter 'P', and it matched up with the letter 'H' in the keyword, so I would use the alphabet starting with 'H' to code 'P'. Using this method, 'P' would be changed to 'W' in your text.
Very nice blog post Petra It was well explained and sounds fun unlike my book. The only part I did not get was the explanation about the technical word I got a bit confused on that part otherwise awesome blog post.
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