We seem to have an instinctive fascination for mysteries and, especially, for mysteries that revolve around secret codes. This penchant brought about a publishing sensation in 2003-Dan Brown's novel ...

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 ...

Introduction If you need to send a secret message to a friend, how could you prevent other people from reading it? One way is to encrypt the message—that is, use a secret code that only you and your ...