How We Cracked the Code Book Ciphers (2000) [pdf]

That was an excellent book!

I got the book and couldn't put it down. Luckily when I got to the contest at the back I found myself with a couple of weeks of summer holidays with Pascal and my 286 and no internet connection.

I cracked the manual ciphers with computer programs. I started on the Engima cipher, but did not create an accurate Enigma machine (the drawings in the book were incomplete and I didn't know that and had no internet access).

A couple of years ago I chanced upon the book again and set about solving the Enigma part. https://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/145830743193/my-...

Fond memories! :D

The book is warmly recommended.

Apparently Stage 1 - 7 were classical ciphers, followed by brute-forcing the 56-bit DES, and factoring RSA-155 though distributed computing.

> Compaq provided access to one of their benchmarking computers with four 667 MHz Alphas and 8 GB of primary memory.

This was massive computational power for a workstation in 2000! It's always impressive to see the progress of Moore's Law, even although single-core performance has peaked long ago.

Loved this book. Didn't realize the codes had been cracked. Thanks for sharing!