alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What cryptography book do you recommend for reading with 10 year olds?
We are looking for a Cryptography book recommendation to read with our 10 year old who loves making up his own ciphers. He loves reading adult math and science books with us at breakfast like Ignition!, Humble Pi, and The Hunt for Vulcan. All of the kids books that we've found are just puzzles, but I don't want to get something way over his head math-wise. A good history with basic theory behind the different types would be perfect. Thanks!
Comments
There's an edition of The Code Book for youth: https://www.amazon.com/clp/0385900325?lv=shuf&channelId=500
Fred Wrixon's Codes and Ciphers was fun for me and a friend around this age, and it looks like it's been updated in the decades since.
One angle from which it's fun is just learning operations you can do on text (and text represented as numbers). Empirically it turns out just Shannon's "diffusion and confusion" and lots of rounds gets you far in symmetric cryptography, which we can see from a lot of simple RAX primitives working fine. But it's nice for reasons outside cryptography to get a feel for the zoo of other things you can do, what offers diffusion and nonlinearity, how you can ensure a function's reversible, etc.
If you did one topic from public-key land, I think Diffie-Hellman is easier to understand than RSA without much build-up: it makes sense from the basic properties of exponents (ones modular arithmetic doesn't change), and modular arithmetic connects to fun stuff about the primes. Merkle hash signatures also make sense with just symmetric cryptography, and are post-quantum-resistant!
I hadn't really thought about how you'd even approach PQ encryption, but maybe ECC-based McEliece is cool? You can get a feel for it even without detail on the hard decoding problem, and error correcting codes are their own interesting topic.
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.
[delayed]
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).
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
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 :)
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.
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..
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
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!
Scott McCloud's The Bitcoin White Paper Visualized:
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.
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.
https://wearethemutants.com/2018/07/05/usbornes-the-knowhow-... always fun.
(used copies still available)
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.
The Cryptoclub: Using Mathematics to Make and Break Secret Codes
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
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
Maybe The Gold-Bug by Edgar Allen Poe? Although the language might be a bit baroque.
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
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
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).
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]
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.
The Code Book. It’s a great, short war history read about the history of hiding messages and eventually builds up to cryptography.
B ZLZLZ XEVVP OYVQRFYB: M JFZGMZFNX QHUMH.
U WJZI VH KZJBY QYIM HUZFGBZ.
Key: TRENCH
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Not a cryptography book but highly recommended for the young curious mind: The Cuckoo's Egg
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.
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