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Really good article about the women who worked at Bletchley Park during World War II, breaking German Enigma-encrypted messages.
EDITED TO ADD (7/13): There’s also a book: The Debs of Blechley Park and Other Stories, by Michael Smith.
Here is a listing of all the documents that the NSA has in its archives that are dated earlier than 1930.
This is William Friedman’s highly annotated copy of Herbert Yardley’s book, The American Black Chamber.
A fully functional four-rotor Enigma machine sold for $463,500.
Wow.
Yale University Press has published a facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript.
The manuscript is also available online.
This was newly released under FOIA at my request: Victor C. Williams, Jr., Donn B. Parker, and Charles C. Wood, “Impacts of Federal Policy Options for Nonmilitary Cryptography,” NTIA-CR-81-10, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, US. Department of Commerce, June 1981. It argues that cryptography is an important enabling technology. At this point, it’s only of historical value.
This 1947 document describes a German machine to cryptanalyze the American
EDITED TO ADD (5/14): German attacks on the M-209.
This is an interesting historical use of Viking runes as a secret code. Yes, the page is all in Finnish. But scroll to the middle. There’s a picture of the Stockholm city police register from 1536, about a married woman who was found with someone who was not her husband. The recording scribe “encrypted” her name and home address using runes.
Jim Sanborn has given the world another clue to the fourth cyphertext in his Kryptos sculpture at the CIA headquarters.
Good article, with pictures, diagrams, and code.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.