Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy. He is the former chief technology correspondent for Newsweek. Today he is an editor at Wired, and author of eight books. Crypto, won the Frankfurt E-book Award for the best non-fiction book of 2001.
If you’ve ever made an e-commerce purchase with your credit card, then you have used cryptography.
Steven guides the reader into learning about the history of cryptography. This book begins with Whitfield Diffie. He authored initial developments of cryptographic keys. He was then joined by Martin Hellman in 1976.
From this point, Steven reveals how Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, teaching at MIT also furthered cryptography research. Their development led to the formation of their company, RSA.
The National Security Agency (NSA) certainly interpreted these cryptography developments as a threat and began working to thwart their developments.
From RSA to NSA
Cryptography would in fact become the cornerstone of the internet’s commercial success. Without Crypto there would certainly be dozens perhaps hundreds of companies attempting to secure internet traffic based upon proprietarily standards. A pure idea of spaghetti soup. Yet a private key and a public key was proving to be the secret miracle the internet was waiting for to be the global resource it has morphed into since the 1990s.
Steven closes the book with a deep look at the US Government’s attempt to control data by proposing The Clipper chip. This was a hardware device for every device’s logic board.
Think if your home computer and your iPhone had the Clipper Chip. The chip would be an escrow key, each time a communication was sent, the chip would in fact, send a copy message key to the US Government. Each message would be stored until the government, for any reason would gain access to each conversation. Just amazing.
Consider this a must read
In conclusion, Steven has written a wonderful book about cryptography. This is mandatory reading for understanding how (and why) you need to protect your internet communications.