Customer Reviews

Selections from Cryptologia: History, People, and Technology (The Artech House Telecommunications Library)

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Cryptologia is the definitive magazine in the area of cryptology. It's a small magazine with limited circulation, largely to professionals in the area. Often though it publishes articles dealing with areas of interest to us amateurs. These articles might include more information that has just become available on the German Enigma of World War II, or the article in this book on code breaking by the Vatican.

It now appears pretty generally accepted that the Japanese codes that had been broken did not provide any definitive information as to the attack on Pearl Harbour. There is new information however about the receipt of some messages sent in other non-broken codes that would have directly pointed to Pearl as the target. Unfortunately these codes were not broken until after the war. There is enough confusion about these messages that people are still not convinced of its truth. But there are two articles on the subject in this book, one taking each side.

Reading Cryptologia to pull out the interesting article would be a task. Artech House, the publisher of this book has managed to pull together what amounts to the editorial board of Cryptologia to put this book together. It follows the supurb book - The German Enigma Cipher Machine. These books seem expensive, but they are not printed in high volume and the contain information not available anywhere else. I recommend buying them before they go out of print.

Now I'd like to put in a request to these authors and publishers. Do a book on Russian/Soviet codes and code breaking. Success in code breaking seem to come with capabilities in music, mathematics, and chess -- skills at which the Russians seem to excell. And of course there's the Venona project.

Regardless, please keep these books coming.

This book is a collection of articles from the periodical "Cryptologia" The articles included are mostly recollections of memories from the people that were there, breaking and making codes. A large portion of the book is dedicated to the German Enigma used throughout WW2. This book is unparalleled as a research source and contains the best documentation I've ever seen on cryptanalysis methods employed in the past.