The Manga Guide To Cryptography, by Masaaki Mitani, Shinichi Sato, and Idero Hinoki

This book is simultaneously a discussion of cryptography as well as a bit of a mystery novel.  Now, if one is alert and aware, the mystery is not particularly difficult to solve and the reader may very well solve the novel before any of the characters do, which tends to make at least some readers (like this one) a bit irritated at the way that the novel is framed where at least two female characters are portrayed as far more intelligent than any of the male characters in the book.  When these characters are not nearly as smart as they think they are, it tends to undercut the feminist message of the text itself.  There are, unfortunately, readers who will celebrate the violent behavior of this book’s protagonist against her brother and be less than observant of how dim-witted she in fact is despite being the voice of understanding for the book’s material.  I would rather have had the book reverse its male and female characters and have a brother explain matters of cryptography to his sister while avoiding violence or arrogance or aiding and assisting criminals through being ignorant of their identities.

This book is a bit more than 200 pages and is divided into four large chapters.  After a preface and a prologue, the book begins with a discussion of the foundations of encryption that discuss what a cipher is, Shannon’s encryption model, as well as the types of ciphers that can be used and various key space and perfectly secure encryption (1).  After that the author discusses symmetric-key algorithms, still more types of useful ciphers, and how to work with AES And DES when it comes to keys and ciphertexts (2).  After this there is a chapter on public-key encryption that also manages to move into a discussion of prime numbers and integer factorizations as well as the use of Fermat’s method and Euler’s methods for determining prime numbers and how to generate and decrypt ciphertexts using RSA encryption (3).  Finally, the book ends with a discussion of the practical applications of encryption in such areas as authentication codes, hybrid encryption, digital signatures, public-key infrastructure, and zero-knowledge interactive proof (4) as well as a discussion about what is next in the field along with various supplement material on entryption security and quantum cryptography.

Although I am a reader who has a great interest in semiotics and communication in general, and this book has a lot to deal with those subjects as it shows how it is that signals can be intercepted and corrupted and how it is that companies try to protect themselves and the messages of their customers from efforts to corrupt communication through various types of encryption.  I was especially intrigued to see that some types of encryption are so good that they are not allowed because the government itself wants access to messages and therefore it forbids the most secure types of encryption that would be impossible for them to hack.  As if often the case, unfortunately, the corruption and lack of respect by government for the privacy of citizens has meant that communication is less secure overall when one considers the brute force and other means that hackers have of gathering passwords and solving encryption keys.  Paradoxically enough, a book about improving the safety of technology and communication only underscores how unsafe and how vulnerable those signals are to being read and/or corrupted by intermediaries between the sender and receiver, which is not quite a reassuring message in a book that sends a lot of mixed signals already.