A review by tony_t
The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn

4.0

Although dated (this volume was last updated in 1996) David Kahn has written a masterful and comprehensive history of secret writing and the attempts to break those encyphered or encrypted messages. It was fun to render some of these techniques into computer code and it helped me to gain insights into the inners workings of the arious approaches. Equally as interesting were the stories of individuals who labored long and hard to decrypt messages. A big part of the work deals with the military, of course, but Kahn also includes business, rum running and then, with the advent of the computer and the internet cryptography becomes an integral part of most online transactions (https://; Signal texting app; VPNs; etc.). This book requires a big investment of your time (1000 pages) but if you are sufficiently interested you will not be disappointed.