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

“It was the threat of enemy interception that motivated the development of codes and ciphers: techniques for disguising a message so that only the intended recipient can read it.”

If codes and ciphers had remained a hobby of those who merely thought such a thing was interesting, it never would have developed to the point that it has in the modern era. Encryption is driven largely by the need to keep information secure from enemies, and the military applications of codes and ciphers will always continue to drive the field forward.

“[T]he science of secrecy is largely a secret science.”

The author notes at the very outset that even a long and detailed book such as this will inevitably fall short by the simple fact that the subject matter is itself a matter of secrecy and privacy. The most informative details, and the most up-to- date information, are necessarily going to be kept hidden by the only people that know them, and so a book of this nature is only going to be able to divulge so much information.

“[I]n parallel with the development of steganography, there was the evolution of cryptography, derived from the Greek word kryptos, meaning ‘hidden.’”

The very first attempts at passing along secret information involved the mere hiding of the message. The message itself was written in the vernacular, with no attempt to hide the meaning of the written words, but the message itself was hidden somehow. This rudimentary mode of secrecy was quickly outmoded by the actual hiding of the message within the message itself, substituting the letters and characters for others.