- _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'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.
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).
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.
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 :)
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.
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!
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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
"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.
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.
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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.
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?
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:
https://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/omnilingual.html
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.
https://usborne.com/au/official-spy-s-handbook-9781409584384
https://usborne.com/us/quicklinks/quicklink/8648-the-officia... if the AU link doesn't work for you.
There's an edition of The Code Book for youth: https://www.amazon.com/clp/0385900325?lv=shuf&channelId=500
That's my recommendation as well !
Thanks. I'm torn he loves reading himself, but also when we work through adult books with him. :)
In case anyone isn't aware there is also a regular non-youth version of this book that is excellent.
I was going to recommend this one! I read it at about that age and work in a cryptography-adjacent role now. Great book.
Recommended it as well!
Seconding this one!
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).
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.
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 :)
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.
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!
Don't forget about the NSAs CryptoKids!
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.
Thanks, that's great. So glad for archive.org
At that age, I was obsessed over Sherlock Holmes' The Adventure of the Dancing Men by Arthur Conan Doyle
[0]: https://sherlock-holm.es/stories/pdf/letter/1-sided/danc.pdf
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.
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..
That is a fun idea, and a great Christmas present... which is one of our goals. :)
Sort of a Sophie's World for Crypto. I'm sure this would be a treasured experience.
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.
https://www.schneier.com/books/applied-cryptography/
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.
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.
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
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.
Thanks. Yeah, I'll have to flip through it. I might try Cracking Codes with Python by Al Sweigart first.
The Code Book is what got me interested in cryptography and by extension computer science. I thought it was a fun and varied read.
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".
Nice, I'll look that up he love Nova like science programs.
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.
Simon Singh is a very entertaining writer, I'll give him that. (Also a pleasant person, I've met him once or twice.)
For the Age, the perfect Christmas gift:
https://www.amazon.com/Cryptanalysis-Study-Ciphers-Their-Sol...
Helen Gaines Cryptanalysis: A Study of Ciphers and Their Solution
https://wearethemutants.com/2018/07/05/usbornes-the-knowhow-... always fun.
(used copies still available)
The Code Book. It’s a great, short war history read about the history of hiding messages and eventually builds up to cryptography.
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
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.
Maybe The Gold-Bug by Edgar Allen Poe? Although the language might be a bit baroque.
I very much remember this, from when I was ten or so.
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...
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.
Thanks. We just finished Gulliver's Travels with him, so I bet he can handle it.
Title: Can You Crack the Code?: A Fascinating History of Ciphers and Cryptography
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
Thanks for the recommendations, Top Secret was just recommended elsewhere so we'll check them out.
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]
[1]: https://nostarch.com/mangacrypto
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.
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Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Absolutely not a book appropriate for 10 year olds lol
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).
Thanks for the recommendation, always great to hear of books begin the journey.
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.
B ZLZLZ XEVVP OYVQRFYB: M JFZGMZFNX QHUMH.
U WJZI VH KZJBY QYIM HUZFGBZ.
Key: TRENCH
Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"
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?
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Not a cryptography book but highly recommended for the young curious mind: The Cuckoo's Egg
Thanks, I've read it awhile ago, you're right he would probably enjoy the "story".
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the code book
Work with your llms and figure out a “zero knowledge proof” game that can be played on paper.
Something like that would be practical.
OK, Thanks for the suggestion for a practical exercise.
Oops and that’s “zero knowledge proof”!