• For revision purposes, the 2004 exam gives the best guide to how this year's exam will look.
• Coursework 6 has now been marked. More than one-third of the essays handed in were awarded a mark of zero due to blatant copying. On your transcript of marks you will see a seventh mark, equal to the third mark. This is so that the marks for the cipher challenge count double.
• Solutions 5 and Coursework 6 now on the web.
• Details of how an audio CD is encoded and decoded are available here, for anyone who is interested.
• My office hours are Monday 3.30-4.30 and Wednesday 1-2 in room G51.

• Course Description from the College course directory
• Course Description from the Maths UG Handbook
• Course information sheet (PDF file)
  Updated with correction to lecture rooms
• Key objectives and exam rubric
• Sample exam paper
• 2003 exam paper

Notes

• Notes 1: Introduction
• Notes 2: Substitution ciphers
• Notes 3: Stream ciphers
• Notes 4: Stream ciphers, continued
• Notes 5: Stream ciphers, concluded
• Notes 6: Public-key cryptography
• Notes 7: Public-key cryptography: RSA
• Notes 8: Public-key cryptography: Primes and factorisation
• Notes 9: Public-key cryptography: El-Gamal
• Notes 10: Public-key cryptography: Other ciphers
• Notes 11: Secret sharing and other matters
• Notes 12: Quantum effects; bibliography

Coursework

• Coursework 1 (due 18 January), and Solutions
• Coursework 2 (due 2 February), and Solutions
• Coursework 3, THE CIPHER CHALLENGE (due 16 February)
• Coursework 4 (due 2 March), and Solutions
• Coursework 5 (due 16 March), and Solutions
• Coursework 6 (due 6 April)

The recommended book for reading before taking the course is Simon Singh's The Code Book; the recommended course text is Paul Garrett's Making, Breaking Codes. (See below for bibliographical details.)

I have been asked to draw your attention to a possible answer to the question "What to do next?". The National University of Ireland, Galway do an M.Sc. in Communication Systems: you can find details here.

• Here is the list of ASCII 7-bit codes, and here are the International Telegraph Codes.
• Here are three samples of random text matching the letter, digram and trigram frequencies in a piece of English text (Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland).
• Here is "FISH and I" by W. T. Tutte (one of the Bletchley Park codebreakers).
• Here is a web page about the recent proof by Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena that primality can be tested in polynomial time.
• Here is the Trinity College Historical Cryptography website.
• Here is a collection of Maple lessons on topics in cryptography from Adept Scientific, which can be downloaded free of charge.
• Here are some lecture notes on computational complexity.
• Here is the full text of Gadsby, by Ernest Vincent Wright (a novel which doesn't contain the letter E).
• Here are John Preskill's Caltech notes on quantum computing.

• General:
  • Henry Beker and Fred Piper, Cipher Systems: The Protection of Communications, Northwood Books, London, 1982.
  • Robert Churchhouse, Codes and Ciphers: Julius Caesar, the Enigma, and the Internet, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.
  • Paul Garrett, Making, Breaking Codes: An Introduction to Cryptology, Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, 2001.
  • Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-Breaking, Fourth Estate, London, 1999.
  • Douglas R. Stinson, Cryptography: Theory and Practice (2nd edition), Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, 2002.
  • Dominic Welsh, Codes and Cryptography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988.
• Historical:
  • Helen Fouché Gaines, Cryptanalysis: A Study of Ciphers and their Solution, Dover Publ. (reprint), New York, 1956.
  • F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp (eds.), Code Breakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993.
  • Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Vintage, London, 1992.
  • Leo Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide: The Story of SOE's Code War, HarperCollins, London, 1998.
  • Doron Swade, The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer, Little, Brown & Co., London, 2000.
  • Gordon Welchman, The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes, M & M Baldwin, Cleobury Mortimer, 1998.
  • Peter Wright, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, Stoddart Publ. Co., Toronto, 1987.
• Fictional:
  • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Dancing Men, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Penguin (reprint), London, 1981.
  • Edgar Allan Poe, The Gold-Bug, in Complete Tales and Poems, Castle Books, Edison, NJ, 1985.
  • Dorothy L. Sayers, Have His Carcase, Victor Gollancz, London, 1932.
• Related topics:
  • Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, BBC publications, London, 1965.
  • M. R. Garey and D. S. Johnson, Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness, Freeman, San Francisco, 1979.
  • Ray Hill, A First Course in Coding Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986.
  • Michael A. Nielsen and Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Information and Quantum Computation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.
• Miscellaneous:
  • G. Mander (ed.), wot txters hav bin w8ing 4, Michael O'Mara Books, London, 2000.
  • Georges Perec (translated by Gilbert Adair), A Void, Harvill Press, 1994.
  • Ernest Vincent Wright, Gadsby, Wetzel Publishing Co., Los Angeles, 1931.

Robert A. Wilson
(based on Peter Cameron's original page)
Created 5 January 2005
Updated 29 April 2005