It was the spring of 1942. America’s back was against the wall. The Japanese Navy ruled the Pacific. Pearl Harbor was still in ruins. In a dim basement beneath Pearl, Commander Joseph Rochefort ...

How does one crack the world’s most famous code? The breakthroughs on Kryptos provide a guided tour through the cat and mouse ...

Declaration of truth in reviewing: I have never wanted to make a code in my entire life. Truth of reading experience: This book made me want to start my own codemaker’s field kit. There’s something ...

The 35-year-old saga of Kryptos, an enigmatic sculpture containing four encrypted messages outside the CIA headquarters, just ...

When Ricky McCormick’s body was discovered in a Missouri cornfield in 1999, police officers discovered something unusual in his pockets: Two curious notes that appeared to be written in code. If ...

You could do worse than to confuse the meanings of "code" and "cipher"—even cryptographers sometime use the terms as though they had the same meaning. There is, however, a definite distinction between ...

1. Introduction -- 2. From Julius Caesar to simple substitution -- 3. Polyalphabetic systems -- 4. Jigsaw ciphers -- 5. Two-letter ciphers -- 6. Codes -- 7. Ciphers for spies -- 8. Producing random ...

Known for his editing of poetry anthologies, Paul B. Janeczko studies another form of often-perplexing writing in Top Secret: A Handbook of Codes, Ciphers, and Secret Writing, illus. by Jenna LaReau.