Decrypted secrets
Cryptology, for millennia a "secret science", is rapidly gaining in practical importance for the protection of communication channels, databases, and software. Beside its role in computerized information systems (public key systems), more and more applications within computer systems and networks are appearing, which also extend to access rights and source file protection. The first part of this book treats secret codes and their uses - cryptography. The second part deals with the process of covertly decrypting a secret code - cryptanalysis - where in particular advice on assessing methods is given. The book presupposes only elementary mathematical knowledge. Spiced with a wealth of exciting, amusing, and sometimes personal stories from the history of cryptology, it will also interest general readers.
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What Hacker News says
- There was also a Friedrich L. Bauer (no relation) who wrote the excellent book Decrypted Secrets: Methods and Maxims of Cryptology which details both the History and the Mathematics of classical ciphers. It is a pretty rare book to find in print form nowadays so here is a archive link - https://archive.org/details/DecryptedSecretsMethodsMaximsOfC...
- I looked at Bauer's 'Decrypted Secrets' and when it gets to this it goes - something, ADFGVX, something, Kriegsmarine-modified-Enigma, Shannon and then Suddenly, Horst. It's been a long time since I've read any of the relevant history but it's kind of coming back to me that in the period you picked, cryptography wasn't really a field of significant public research. The Codebreakers was published in '68, just a couple of years before Lucifer. It doesn't even cover the Enigma breaks at all and the publication was considered a national security concern. It seems like not an awful lot about the classified research has come out, even in the decades in which it's surely been publicly replicated and superseded.
I thought they'd be more directly published (rather than inferred) about the technical methods of VENONA but even there, there's very little. Like, they haven't even released the raw decrypts, just translations. And a bunch of papers congratulating themselves on how awesome they were.
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