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The Code Book: the Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography Reviewed by Jim Reeds

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The Code Book: the Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography Reviewed by Jim Reeds rev-reeds.qxp 1/11/00 1:42 PM Page 369 Book Review The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography Reviewed by Jim Reeds The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from events. This makes Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography coherent exposition Simon Singh difficult. Almost every Doubleday Books, 1999 war, however, has no- ISBN 0-385-49531-5 table instances where 402 pages, $24.95 some cipher message solution foils a plot or It is hard to write a good book about the his- wins a battle. Here it tory of cryptography. The subject is technical is easy to connect the enough to be a turnoff for many readers. The ev- cryptographic or idence a historian of cryptography works from is cryptanalytic techni- often suspect. Because much of the practice and calities with particu- research in the field was carried out in secret, any lar historical events, particular document or interview must be viewed but a book that relies with suspicion: did the author or interviewee know too much on such in- the full truth? Healthy suspicion about the com- stances becomes in effect no more than an adven- petency of sources is of course appropriate in all ture story anthology. branches of historical research, but in the history So it is no surprise that there are few general of cryptography the proportion of misinformed or surveys of the history of cryptography and fewer deceptive sources is probably greater than gener- good ones. The rule of thumb seems to be one new ally found in the history of science or of technol- book every thirty years. ogy. The historian’s standard technique of precise In 1902 and 1906 Alois Meister published his and thorough citation of documentary evidence is immensely scholarly Die Anfänge der Modernen Diplomatischen Geheimschrift and Die Geheim- therefore especially important in the history of schrift im Dienste der Päpstlichen Kurie, repro- cryptography. Unfortunately, for popular works ducing and summarizing texts relevant to cryp- this technique can mean death to readability. tography in the late medieval and early modern In cryptography technical developments often periods. The readership cannot have been large. came in reaction to events and activities which were At the opposite extreme of readability was the at the time secret or, conversely, had ceased to be se- 1939 Secret and Urgent: The Story of Codes and cret. If we do not understand the “who knew what Ciphers by the journalist and naval affairs com- when” details correctly, our reconstructed timetables mentator Fletcher Pratt. The book presented a for technical progress seem to show puzzling fits and breezy series of thrilling anecdotal historical starts, apparently unconnected with contemporary episodes involving ciphers and code-breaking ex- Jim Reeds is at AT&T Labs, Florham Park, NJ. His e-mail ploits. Each episode came complete with Sunday address is [email protected]. supplement-style character sketches and just the MARCH 2000 NOTICES OF THE AMS 369 rev-reeds.qxp 1/11/00 1:42 PM Page 370 right amount of technical information about the ci- episodic snapshot method. His remaining three pher or cryptanalysis in question. The technical dis- chapters are based mostly on personal interviews cussions were not always tightly bound to the fac- with leading participants. Chapter 6 describes the tual historical setting: although they were always invention and early development of public key illustrative of the type of ciphers involved in this cryptography by W. Diffie, M. Hellman, R. Merkle, or that historical episode, they were not necessar- R. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. Adleman in the U.S., and ily verbatim transcripts of documents in archives. independently, but in secret, by J. Ellis, C. Cocks, Pratt thus managed to make the technicalities—al- and M. Williamson in the U.K. Chapter 7 describes ways clearly explained—seem important and man- the current controversy about the proper role of aged to teach a bit of history in the nonrigorous way cryptography in a free society: personal freedom a historical movie or novel might teach a bit of his- versus the interests of the state, privacy versus tory. Like many others, I was inspired by this book wiretapping, key escrow, export of strong cryp- when I read it in my early teens. It was only much tography, and so on. The final chapter describes later that I came to realize that its lack of bibliog- quantum cryptography, the new system of com- raphy and detailed footnotes made it useless as a munications made untappable by exploiting the fact serious history of cryptography. that the polarization of a photon is altered when In 1967, about thirty years after Pratt’s book, a it is measured. much more serious book appeared, The Code- The good news is that Singh’s book has all the breakers, by David Kahn, also a journalist, but one good qualities of Pratt’s. Unfortunately, Kahn’s with a far sterner approach to standards of docu- criticism of Pratt’s book also applies to Singh’s mentation. Where Pratt had two pages of notes and book. Almost every page has small errors of fact. no literature references, Kahn gave 163 pages. Kahn’s In many places it is clear that Singh does not re- method (which he pursued over many years with ally understand the material he copies from his great energy) seems to have been simply this: to read sources. Many of these errors are of little conse- everything about cryptography in all the world’s li- quence when taken individually, but their cumu- braries and archives, to interview all cryptographers, lative effect is to destroy a knowledgeable reader’s and to write it all down as sensibly, as accurately, and confidence in the author’s standards of accuracy. with as much detail as possible; his book has 1,180 Here are just a few examples: pages. This is the book I read when I was in college. • On page 128 Singh describes the wired code By then I had grown up enough to appreciate Kahn’s wheels of the Enigma cipher machine (the “ro- comment in his preface that although his love for tors”, which he oddly calls “scramblers”): “The cryptography had also been sparked by Pratt’s book, scrambler, a thick rubber disc riddled with he was disappointed in the book. Kahn bemoaned wires…” But the Enigma’s rotors were not Pratt’s “errors and omissions, his false generaliza- made of rubber but of aluminum, brass, and tions based on no evidence, and his unfortunate Bakelite. Singh may have misunderstood a sen- predilection for inventing facts.” tence on page 411 of Kahn’s book: “The body Unfortunately, Kahn’s book was published a of a rotor consists of a thick disk of insulat- short time before the facts about the Polish and ing material, such as Bakelite or hard rub- British success in breaking the German Enigma ci- ber…”, accurately describing the rotors, not of pher of World War II became publicly known and an Enigma machine, but of a different cipher also a short while before the amazing invention of machine. the new number-theoretical “public key cryptog- • On page 168 Singh states that A. M. Turing (in raphy” techniques now pervasive in computers his 1937 paper “On computable numbers, with and the Internet. As a result, these interesting and an application to the Entscheidungsproblem”) important topics received no treatment. called “this hypothetical device a universal Tur- Now, thirty years after Kahn’s book, a new his- ing machine [Singh’s italics].” But of course the tory of cryptography has appeared, again by a jour- terms “Turing machine” and “universal Turing nalist: Simon Singh’s The Code Book: The Evolution machine” were not used by Turing himself; a of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum glance at his paper shows he used “computing Cryptography, a bestseller in England in its first machines” and “universal machines”. months of publication. Singh states in his preface that • On pages 187–8, Singh states that the British “In writing The Code Book, I have had two main ob- WWII code-breaking organization, the “Gov- jectives. The first is to chart the evolution of ernment Code and Cypher School”, was dis- codes…the book’s second objective is to demon- banded after the war and then replaced by an- strate how the subject is more relevant today than other, the “Government Communications ever before.” Headquarters”, or GCHQ. In fact, the change Singh’s first five chapters cover the history of occurred in 1942 and was one in name only. cryptography up through the end of the Second • On page 191 Singh claims the American break- World War, summarizing material found in earlier ing of the Japanese “Purple” cipher enabled the books and journal articles, presented by the naval victory at Midway and the assassination 370 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 47, NUMBER 3 rev-reeds.qxp 1/11/00 1:42 PM Page 371 of Admiral Yamamoto. In fact, these were due chiffre indéchiffrable. But Kahn (whose book ap- to the breaking of the “JN-25” code. “Purple” pears in Singh’s list of references), on page 107, was a machine cipher, roughly equivalent to shows an example of a homophonic cipher, la- the German Enigma, whereas “JN-25” was a belled as such, from 1401, about three centuries hand system relying on code books and ran- before Singh’s invented invention. dom number tables. A different kind of misunderstanding occurs in Singh’s unfamiliarity with the technical vocab- the discussion of the attack on the German Enigma ulary used by his sources seems to have led him machine in the early 1930s.
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