I first saw this at Schneier on Security. David Kahn, author of The Codebreakers, has passed away at 93. The Codebreakers was considered the best book on the history of cryptography; so much so that it’s reported that the NSA tried to prevent its initial publication. Regardless of what happened in those early days of the book, Kahn was later scholar-in-residence for the NSA and was a Hall of Honor inductee.
I remember reading parts of The Codebreakers about 20 or so years ago when I was studying a lot of cryptography due to work research into public key infrastructure (PKI) as we were looking at deploying certificate services where I worked. I think it’s time for a re-read.
Databases - Infrastructure - Security 