Examples showing how to use char() and code() in Excel
Annotated Bibliography:
(Suggestions are welcome.)
Thomas H. Barr.
Intvitation to Cryptology.
Prentice Hall, 2002.
Helen Fouché Gaines.
Cryptanalysis: A Study of Ciphers and their Solution.
Dover Publications, New York, 1939.
Gaines describes many of the classic transposition and substitution
ciphers, and provides detailed instructions for their cryptanalysis.
As you'd guess from the copyright date, this is all pencil-and-paper
stuff.
Martin Gardner.
Codes, Ciphers, and Secret Writing.
Dover Publications, New York, 1972.
This very friendly and relatively short book describes many
transposition and substitution ciphers, and includes a fascinating
chapter on invisible inks.
David Kahn.
The Codebreakers.
Macmillan, New York, 1967.
This twelve-hundred-page monster traces the use of codes and ciphers
throughout history (Western history, mostly). The historical accounts
are often gripping (they often include fascinating character
sketches),
and they are interspersed with very readable
discussions of the nuts and bolts of cryptographic techniques of each
historical period.
This is the acknowledged master reference work classical
cryptography.
David Kahn.
Seizing the Enigma:
The Race to break the German U-boat codes, 1939 - 1943.
Souvenir, London, 1992.
This is a very readable account of the
activities that allowed the Allies to read
a good deal of the communication between the
German command and the U-boat fleet during World War II.
The characters include brilliant cryptographers,
daring spies, and heroic soldiers;
the intertwining of so many disparate
people and events makes for fascinating reading.
The discussion of the Enigma code itself is sketchy,
but at least it's present.
Robert Edward Lewand.
Cryptological Mathematics.
The Mathematical Association of America, 2000.
This approximately parallels the textbook by Barr, except that it does
not discuss modern block ciphers and DES. The mathematical
prerequisites are minimal.
Leo Marks.
Between Silk and Cyanide.
The Free Press, New York, 1998.
Marks worked for British intelligence during World War II, trying to
reconstruct messages that had been incorrectly enciphered or
incorrectly transmitted by underground agents working on the
Continent. This is the story of his years in that job, his
interactions with the agents, and his attempts to convince his
military superiors to switch to a more secure and more robust
encryption scheme. It reads like a novel -- sort of a combination of
a good spy thriller and Catch-22.
Ivan Niven, Herbert Zuckerman, and Hugh Montgomery.
An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers.
John Wiley & Sons, New York, fifth edition, 1991.
This is a standard textbook on Number Theory, aimed at the advanced
undergraduate or beginning graduate student level. It's a good
reference for the details behind public-key cryptography, and some of
the techniques that contemporary mathematicians use to attack the
problem of factoring products of large primes.
Simon Singh.
The Code Book.
Anchor Books, New York, 1999.
This is an excellent
and very readable
account of the history and practice of cryptography.
Abraham Sinkov.
Elementary Cryptanalysis: A Mathematical Approach.
Random House and the L. W. Singer Company, New York, 1968.
The mathematics in this book is very clear and accessible.
The book covers
many of the same cryptanalysis techniques as the Gaines book, but
uses mathematical notation, so that the techniques can be generalized
and automated more easily.