Cracking the Cipher Challenge

Speaker: Dr. Simon Singh
28th September 2002

In his history of cryptography, The Code Book, Simon Singh included ten encrypted messages with a prize of £10,000 for the first person to decipher all of them. Thousands of amateur and professional codebreakers took up the Cipher Challenge, but it took over a year before the messages were cracked.

Simon Singh will be talking about how he constructed the Cipher Challenge and how the winners eventually cracked it. In particular, he will be using the Cipher Challenge to give an introduction to the history of cryptography and to demonstrate why encryption is more important today than ever before. Along the way, he will demonstrate a genuine Second World War Enigma cipher machine.

After completing his PhD in particle physics at Cambridge University, Simon Singh became a science journalist. He is the author of two bestselling books, Fermat's Last Theorem and The Code Book. He was also a producer and director in the BBC TV Science Department. He has recently presented programmes on BBC Radio and Channel 4 (The Science of Secrecy, Five Numbers, The Serendipity of Science). His website is at www.simonsingh.net

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