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WillAdams 13 hours ago [-]
A couple from my childhood:
- _Codes & Secret Writing_ by Herbert S. Zim
- _Codes and Ciphers: Secret Writing Through the Ages_ by John Laffin
- _Codes, ciphers, and secret writing_ by Martin Gardner
There was another book on alphabets/letterforms and ciphers --- pretty sure it had a cover designed by Oscar Ogg, but blanking on the name and can't find it.
While searching online for that found:
Secret Writing: An Introduction to Cryptograms, Ciphers, and Codes by Henry Lysing and John L. Nanovic
Cryptography adjacent (it's about the difficulty of deciphering a dead language), but H. Beam Piper's novella "Omnilingual" really should be part of the grade school canon --- lightly updated version at:
It teaches the basics of information theory and computability with a series of lessons and paper games (including some ciphers and why they work). All of my kids went through it, and had fun doing it.
Daneel_ 12 hours ago [-]
It's not directly a cryptography book, although it includes some basic cipher guidance, but I LOVED the Usborne Spy's Handbook as a child. It's still available now. I'd thoroughly recommend it - I completely wore it out as a kid, so much so that the book fell apart, leading me to re-purchase it as an adult for nostalgia. Genuinely useful book! I still use some things from it, like estimating crowd sizes.
One of the books that got me interested in cryptography as a kid was Artemis Fowl! It might be too simple for him now, but the gnommish (glyph substitution cipher) on every page was really fun for me to figure out.
twotwotwo 7 hours ago [-]
Fred Wrixon's Codes and Ciphers was fun for me and a friend around this age, and it looks like it's been updated in the decades since.
One angle from which it's fun is just learning operations you can do on text (and text represented as numbers). Empirically it turns out just Shannon's "diffusion and confusion" and lots of rounds gets you far in symmetric cryptography, which we can see from a lot of simple RAX primitives working fine. But it's nice for reasons outside cryptography to get a feel for the zoo of other things you can do, what offers diffusion and nonlinearity, how you can ensure a function's reversible, etc.
If you did one topic from public-key land, I think Diffie-Hellman is easier to understand than RSA without much build-up: it makes sense from the basic properties of exponents (ones modular arithmetic doesn't change), and modular arithmetic connects to fun stuff about the primes. Merkle hash signatures also make sense with just symmetric cryptography, and are post-quantum-resistant!
I hadn't really thought about how you'd even approach PQ encryption, but maybe ECC-based McEliece is cool? You can get a feel for it even without detail on the hard decoding problem, and error correcting codes are their own interesting topic.
tomatocracy 4 hours ago [-]
I don't have a book recommendation but in terms of topics, I would definitely suggest Shamir's secret sharing scheme as a good one to cover. It is pretty accessible mathematically (if you stick to prime finite fields) and "different" enough to the usual conception of a secret code or cipher to make it fun to play around with as well.
cryptoalex 3 days ago [-]
I would suggest Real-World Cryptography by DAVID WONG. It has good introduction covering basic primitives like various hash functions, MAC, KDF, then sym/asym, and so on, all the way to PQC and protocols design. A nice intro book, maybe your 10 y.o. will find it interesting.
P.S. In fact, I was going to send that book to my friend's son who is about same age, and who got some sudden interest in cryptography recently. So it is safe to say that I am now aware of at least two 10 year olds who have interest in Cryptography. I feel a bit surprised, but in a good way :)
mike_richards 3 days ago [-]
Thanks we'll check it out.
He started with inventing his own alphabet and language as he was learning to read and write, which eventually evolved into reinventing the Secret Decoder Ring with increasing complexity, so we want to encourage him in his adventure.
dhosek 13 hours ago [-]
In Code by Sarah and David Flannery (https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565123778/donhosek). I would usually target this at bright high school kids, but I think that your kid might be a good fit for it as well from what you describe. Sarah was a high school student learning about cryptography from her math professor dad (David), and presents a great overview of cryptography from Caesar to modern public key cryptography (she came up with an idea using the fact that matrix multiplication is hard to invert for a cipher scheme although it turned out that there was an easy crack for her matrix-based cipher).
(They went offline a few administrations ago, hence the archive link)
You can also jump around the timeline in the archive to see different versions.
mike_richards 18 hours ago [-]
Thanks, that's great. So glad for archive.org
ashton314 6 hours ago [-]
My 5-yo is enjoying Codes and Ciphers by Sean Callery (ISBN 978-0061374074) which I read when I was about 10. It’s a very pragmatic book: it has oodles of historical codes and ciphers and covers all the basics that you can do with pen-and-paper. Not as much of a history book as The Code Book—I also highly recommend that one.
vessenes 19 hours ago [-]
Not a book but you could construct a little walk through some historical crypto as fun games to play. Caesar cipher, Vigenere cipher, one time pad, then learn about primes and make some repeating keys..you could do a super simple matrix example to make tiny DES s-boxes. I bet claude could come up with some games / fun little exploration things to do together, and you and your son could do a lot of fun motivating math together. You could anchor it with rewards like pictures of you and your partner or some family history or stuff that feels like a treasure hunt.
Mine are out of the house, but I had a few who might have really liked doing something like this.. could make a nice Christmas present, the first mysterious letter..
mike_richards 18 hours ago [-]
That is a fun idea, and a great Christmas present... which is one of our goals. :)
vessenes 13 hours ago [-]
Sort of a Sophie's World for Crypto. I'm sure this would be a treasured experience.
mike_richards 3 days ago [-]
Besides practical books does anyone have opinions about these?
The Code Book by Simon Singh
The Codebreakers by David Kahn
The Mathematics of Secrets by Joshua Holden
dgacmu 19 hours ago [-]
The Codebreakers is a fantastic book and I highly recommend it. I don't know what I think of it for a ten-year-old, it's been a while since I've read it, but my memory is that it is certainly mathematically accessible, but its length and depth may make it daunting, as it probably exceeds the attention horizon of a typical ten-year-old by an order of magnitude or two. But in chunks it could work, and for an adult it's fantastic.
It does assume a fair bit of historical context knowledge, though, much of which probably exceeds 5th grade. Probably 9th graders would have it easier as far as, e.g., familiarity with WWII, etc.
mike_richards 18 hours ago [-]
Thanks. Yeah, I'll have to flip through it. I might try Cracking Codes with Python by Al Sweigart first.
rubendev 17 hours ago [-]
The Code Book is what got me interested in cryptography and by extension computer science. I thought it was a fun and varied read.
helph67 18 hours ago [-]
There was a television series (British?) featuring some of the tales mentioned in David Kahn's book. The TV series could be a good introduction for children. Another book of interest may be Crypto by Stephen Levy - Viking Penguin 2001. Which relates how "rebels beat the (U.S.) government - saving privacy in the Digital Age".
mike_richards 18 hours ago [-]
Nice, I'll look that up he love Nova like science programs.
smath 17 hours ago [-]
Highly recommend 'The Code Book by Simon Singh'. Simon also runs a math circle online called parallel circles from the UK, that is free to attend and is fun for kids.
nephihaha 19 hours ago [-]
Simon Singh is a very entertaining writer, I'll give him that. (Also a pleasant person, I've met him once or twice.)
garrettr_ 13 hours ago [-]
For a 10 year old I would highly recommend Martin Gardner’s “Codes, Ciphers, and Secret Writing”: https://a.co/d/05rZPKiH
It’s a slim volume that focuses on historical and fictional ciphers. It stars with simple shift ciphers like Caesar’s cipher, progresses to more complex substitution ciphers with examples from Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allen Poe, then covers polyalphabetic ciphers like Vigenère and Playfair. It covers basic cryptanalysis and has practice riddles and cryptograms throughout. It even has a chapter on a variety of ways to make invisible ink, which is often an object of fascination for children around that age!
adrian_b 15 hours ago [-]
As a 10-year old, my introduction to cryptography was from reading a few novels by Jules Verne:
The Giant Raft or 800 Leagues On The Amazon
Mathias Sandorf
A Journey To The Centre of the Earth
After reading those, I played with the ciphers described there, i.e. I made and used the transposition grid from Mathias Sandorf and I used various Vigenère ciphers, like that from "800 Leagues On The Amazon".
Due to the interest generated by those stories, a few years later I read various textbooks about modern cryptography.
The book "Applied Cryptography" by Bruce Schneier is now somewhat old, so it is no longer up-to-date, but it is written in a style more accessible for newbies than most textbooks about cryptography, so I think that it would be adequate for a teenager who is good at mathematics.
amstan 9 hours ago [-]
When I was a kid and read 800 Leagues I proceeded to make a whole encryption IDE in Visual Basic 6 for a programming fair that year. I called it "Crypt+". It even had C++ dll based encryption engine plugins.
The funny thing is that I got that book as a prize from a previous year's programming fair.
adrian_b 7 hours ago [-]
Nice.
However, I was a kid in the seventies, when PCs were still in the future, so I had to practice cryptography with pen and paper.
While in high school, I wrote my first programs, but at that time this was done by writing the program (e.g. in FORTRAN) on a special printed form, on a grid where each character was accurately positioned, then the form was given to an operator who transferred the written program on 80-column punched cards, and then the next day you could retrieve the printed results from running your program on an IBM mainframe (printed with a 132-column line printer), together with the deck of punched cards, to be used if you wanted to rerun the program (which you almost always wanted to do, even if the program had been intended to be run only once, because your first attempt of running might have printed only compiler error messages).
There has been a long journey from that until being able to use VB6 or Visual C++.
There's a whole bunch of history books around WW2, the Enigma Machine, and surrounding historical and technical details. I can't recommend any specific one, but this might be more interesting read, with more context, than a text on crypto. It's also quite neat because it's kind of like a basic cipher taken to the extreme, setting the stage for what a revolutionary (and counter-intuitive) discovery public key encryption was.
Was one of the best books I read back in the day, It wasn't only about the algorithms themselves, also about how many verification schemes worked, in an easy to understand manner.
Today I'd say the knowledge of protocols is still valid, just that the algorithms first themselves need to be post-quantum secure.
tptacek 11 hours ago [-]
I don't want to go off on a whole thing here given this is a thread about books for children, but this is definitely not true and hasn't been true for decades; it might never have been true. The cryptography in "Applied Cryptography" would have gotten you in pretty deep trouble as far back as the late 1990s. It's missing most of modern cryptography.
adrian_b 6 hours ago [-]
That book is too old to be useful for practical applications today, but it contains a lot of useful historical information.
It is not missing most of modern cryptography, it misses only a few, albeit very important things, like post-quantum public-key algorithms, memory-hard functions for password-based algorithms, and integrity-verification algorithms with intrinsic encryption (for the latter 2 classes of algorithms I am not aware of any modern cryptography book that includes a correct and complete presentation, despite their practical importance; the information about them is spread over a large number of research papers published during the last quarter of century, and one must search and read all those papers, to be well informed).
Most of the principles of modern cryptography have barely changed after 1980, even if the specific algorithms that implement them have greatly evolved, so that almost no algorithm older than AES is still useful.
For an introduction to the principles of modern cryptography the old book of Schneier is still fine, even if the specific algorithms are no longer useful.
There are much better books for someone who is already familiar with cryptography or with abstract algebra and wants to learn something that can be used in practice, but most of those are too dense for someone without good prior knowledge of mathematics or cryptography.
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
Years ago, I wrote a whole blog post about the problems with this book. Even his much better regarded followup, "Practical Cryptography", is premodern in important ways (that would get you in trouble today).
this, but for a 10 year old consider getting the Great Illustrated Classics abridged version. i read it when i was 10, and it kinda blew my mind.
mike_richards 18 hours ago [-]
Thanks. We just finished Gulliver's Travels with him, so I bet he can handle it.
advael 18 hours ago [-]
Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Katz and Lindell is from a pedagogical perspective one of the best-structured textbooks I've ever read on computer science topics (and in general, but my exposure to textbooks is a biased sample). It goes into the foundations of cryptographic theory and gives a good basis for understanding and contextualizing even advances that have been made since its publication. I think most children can grasp difficult material if an adult that's good at the meta-skill of teaching is helping them with it via individual attention
mike_richards 18 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the recommendation.
"I think most children can grasp difficult material if an adult that's good at the meta-skill of teaching is helping them with it via individual attention"
That's how we feel too and they appreciate being given that chance if we don't push.
dustfinger 19 hours ago [-]
Title: Can You Crack the Code?: A Fascinating History of Ciphers and Cryptography
Helen Gaines
Cryptanalysis: A Study of Ciphers and Their Solution
throwaway81523 18 hours ago [-]
Alvin's Secret Code by Clifford B. Hicks. That's the one that got me started. I think I read it in 3rd grade (age 8).
mike_richards 18 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the recommendation, always great to hear of books begin the journey.
myself248 18 hours ago [-]
Came here to mention this. It's not too applicable to modern/useful cryptography, but introduces a bunch of related hidden-information concepts like product date codes, which I think I actually use far more often.
pull_my_finger 17 hours ago [-]
I haven't read this title, but I've read some of the other manga guides on NoStarch and they're pretty good. Try The Manga Guide to Cryptography[1]
should you and your kid speak french or spanish, "la bible des codes secrets" by Hervé Lehning, the bible of secret codes, is a book I greatly enjoyed as a young teen. it walks you through the history of cryptography until the current times, and has a lot of examples where you can try it out yourself. it is almost not coding-oriented, with only the last 3 chapters explaining modern-day encryption, but as far as my experience goes, few ten-year old enjoy reading documentation or textbook-style books. This one is very didactic, and also an interestin tour through history.
brightball 13 hours ago [-]
The Code Book. It’s a great, short war history read about the history of hiding messages and eventually builds up to cryptography.
13 hours ago [-]
intrasight 16 hours ago [-]
Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson
80fj0348i 12 hours ago [-]
Absolutely not a book appropriate for 10 year olds lol
wltyn 17 hours ago [-]
B ZLZLZ XEVVP OYVQRFYB:
M JFZGMZFNX QHUMH.
U WJZI VH KZJBY QYIM HUZFGBZ.
Key: TRENCH
hoji2012 17 hours ago [-]
Не удалось войти в аккаунт
a
kockonbaevvmunarbek@gmail.com
Google не удается распознать это устройство, и нам не хватает данных, чтобы убедиться, что это вы. В целях безопасности войти в аккаунт прямо сейчас нельзя.
Попробуйте войти в аккаунт из местоположения или с устройства, где вы уже выполняли вход раньше.
hoji2012 17 hours ago [-]
Взломают акаунт хакер kockonbaevvmunarbek@gmail.com как вастанавит акаунт
whalesalad 19 hours ago [-]
Not a cryptography book but highly recommended for the young curious mind: The Cuckoo's Egg
mike_richards 18 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I've read it awhile ago, you're right he would probably enjoy the "story".
jdkee 13 hours ago [-]
Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"
80fj0348i 12 hours ago [-]
For a 10 year old? The book where the main character does No Nut November in a prison cell and then "experiences relief" quite graphically with the love interest?
hoji2012 17 hours ago [-]
Взоломат паролы
hoji2012 17 hours ago [-]
kockonbaevvmunarbek@gmail.com
Theophane_Rame 17 hours ago [-]
the code book
blinkzero 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nukular 3 days ago [-]
Work with your llms and figure out a “zero knowledge proof” game that can be played on paper.
Something like that would be practical.
mike_richards 3 days ago [-]
OK, Thanks for the suggestion for a practical exercise.
- _Codes & Secret Writing_ by Herbert S. Zim
- _Codes and Ciphers: Secret Writing Through the Ages_ by John Laffin
- _Codes, ciphers, and secret writing_ by Martin Gardner
There was another book on alphabets/letterforms and ciphers --- pretty sure it had a cover designed by Oscar Ogg, but blanking on the name and can't find it.
While searching online for that found:
Secret Writing: An Introduction to Cryptograms, Ciphers, and Codes by Henry Lysing and John L. Nanovic
Cryptography adjacent (it's about the difficulty of deciphering a dead language), but H. Beam Piper's novella "Omnilingual" really should be part of the grade school canon --- lightly updated version at:
https://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/omnilingual.html
Once he's getting some diminishing returns, I recommend Computer Science Unplugged: https://classic.csunplugged.org/documents/books/english/CSUn...
It teaches the basics of information theory and computability with a series of lessons and paper games (including some ciphers and why they work). All of my kids went through it, and had fun doing it.
https://usborne.com/au/official-spy-s-handbook-9781409584384
One angle from which it's fun is just learning operations you can do on text (and text represented as numbers). Empirically it turns out just Shannon's "diffusion and confusion" and lots of rounds gets you far in symmetric cryptography, which we can see from a lot of simple RAX primitives working fine. But it's nice for reasons outside cryptography to get a feel for the zoo of other things you can do, what offers diffusion and nonlinearity, how you can ensure a function's reversible, etc.
If you did one topic from public-key land, I think Diffie-Hellman is easier to understand than RSA without much build-up: it makes sense from the basic properties of exponents (ones modular arithmetic doesn't change), and modular arithmetic connects to fun stuff about the primes. Merkle hash signatures also make sense with just symmetric cryptography, and are post-quantum-resistant!
I hadn't really thought about how you'd even approach PQ encryption, but maybe ECC-based McEliece is cool? You can get a feel for it even without detail on the hard decoding problem, and error correcting codes are their own interesting topic.
P.S. In fact, I was going to send that book to my friend's son who is about same age, and who got some sudden interest in cryptography recently. So it is safe to say that I am now aware of at least two 10 year olds who have interest in Cryptography. I feel a bit surprised, but in a good way :)
He started with inventing his own alphabet and language as he was learning to read and write, which eventually evolved into reinventing the Secret Decoder Ring with increasing complexity, so we want to encourage him in his adventure.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100128072801/http://www.nsa.go...
(They went offline a few administrations ago, hence the archive link)
You can also jump around the timeline in the archive to see different versions.
Mine are out of the house, but I had a few who might have really liked doing something like this.. could make a nice Christmas present, the first mysterious letter..
The Code Book by Simon Singh
The Codebreakers by David Kahn
The Mathematics of Secrets by Joshua Holden
It does assume a fair bit of historical context knowledge, though, much of which probably exceeds 5th grade. Probably 9th graders would have it easier as far as, e.g., familiarity with WWII, etc.
It’s a slim volume that focuses on historical and fictional ciphers. It stars with simple shift ciphers like Caesar’s cipher, progresses to more complex substitution ciphers with examples from Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allen Poe, then covers polyalphabetic ciphers like Vigenère and Playfair. It covers basic cryptanalysis and has practice riddles and cryptograms throughout. It even has a chapter on a variety of ways to make invisible ink, which is often an object of fascination for children around that age!
The Giant Raft or 800 Leagues On The Amazon
Mathias Sandorf
A Journey To The Centre of the Earth
After reading those, I played with the ciphers described there, i.e. I made and used the transposition grid from Mathias Sandorf and I used various Vigenère ciphers, like that from "800 Leagues On The Amazon".
Due to the interest generated by those stories, a few years later I read various textbooks about modern cryptography.
The book "Applied Cryptography" by Bruce Schneier is now somewhat old, so it is no longer up-to-date, but it is written in a style more accessible for newbies than most textbooks about cryptography, so I think that it would be adequate for a teenager who is good at mathematics.
The funny thing is that I got that book as a prize from a previous year's programming fair.
However, I was a kid in the seventies, when PCs were still in the future, so I had to practice cryptography with pen and paper.
While in high school, I wrote my first programs, but at that time this was done by writing the program (e.g. in FORTRAN) on a special printed form, on a grid where each character was accurately positioned, then the form was given to an operator who transferred the written program on 80-column punched cards, and then the next day you could retrieve the printed results from running your program on an IBM mainframe (printed with a 132-column line printer), together with the deck of punched cards, to be used if you wanted to rerun the program (which you almost always wanted to do, even if the program had been intended to be run only once, because your first attempt of running might have printed only compiler error messages).
There has been a long journey from that until being able to use VB6 or Visual C++.
(used copies still available)
Was one of the best books I read back in the day, It wasn't only about the algorithms themselves, also about how many verification schemes worked, in an easy to understand manner.
Today I'd say the knowledge of protocols is still valid, just that the algorithms first themselves need to be post-quantum secure.
It is not missing most of modern cryptography, it misses only a few, albeit very important things, like post-quantum public-key algorithms, memory-hard functions for password-based algorithms, and integrity-verification algorithms with intrinsic encryption (for the latter 2 classes of algorithms I am not aware of any modern cryptography book that includes a correct and complete presentation, despite their practical importance; the information about them is spread over a large number of research papers published during the last quarter of century, and one must search and read all those papers, to be well informed).
Most of the principles of modern cryptography have barely changed after 1980, even if the specific algorithms that implement them have greatly evolved, so that almost no algorithm older than AES is still useful.
For an introduction to the principles of modern cryptography the old book of Schneier is still fine, even if the specific algorithms are no longer useful.
There are much better books for someone who is already familiar with cryptography or with abstract algebra and wants to learn something that can be used in practice, but most of those are too dense for someone without good prior knowledge of mathematics or cryptography.
https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical-cry...
https://unspent.cash/bitcoin.jpg
[0]: https://sherlock-holm.es/stories/pdf/letter/1-sided/danc.pdf
In the same vein, is the "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Dancing_M...
"I think most children can grasp difficult material if an adult that's good at the meta-skill of teaching is helping them with it via individual attention" That's how we feel too and they appreciate being given that chance if we don't push.
ISBN-10 : 1681195143 ISBN-13 : 978-1681195148
Title: Top Secret: A Handbook of Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing
ISBN-10 : 0763629723 ISBN-13 : 978-0763629724
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1138413151
https://www.amazon.com/Cryptanalysis-Study-Ciphers-Their-Sol...
Helen Gaines Cryptanalysis: A Study of Ciphers and Their Solution
[1]: https://nostarch.com/mangacrypto
U WJZI VH KZJBY QYIM HUZFGBZ.
Key: TRENCH
Something like that would be practical.