Ask HN: What Cryptography book do you recommend for reading with 10 year olds?
I am looking for a cryptography book recommendation to read with my 10-year-old son, who loves making up his own ciphers. He enjoys reading adult math and science books with us at breakfast, like Ignition!, Humble Pi, and The Hunt for Vulcan. All the kids' books we've found are just puzzles, but I don't want something way over his head math-wise. A good history with basic theory behind the different types would be perfect.
Not a book but you could construct a little walk through some historical crypto as fun games to play. Caesar cipher, Vigenere cipher, one time pad, then learn about primes and make some repeating keys..you could do a super simple matrix example to make tiny DES s-boxes. I bet claude could come up with some games / fun little exploration things to do together, and you and your son could do a lot of fun motivating math together. You could anchor it with rewards like pictures of you and your partner or some family history or stuff that feels like a treasure hunt. Mine are out of the house, but I had a few who might have really liked doing something like this.. could make a nice Christmas present, the first mysterious letter..
Title: Can You Crack the Code?: A Fascinating History of Ciphers and Cryptography ISBN-10 : 1681195143 ISBN-13 : 978-1681195148
There's an edition of The Code Book for youth: https://www.amazon.com/clp/0385900325?lv=shuf&channelId=500
Maybe The Gold-Bug by Edgar Allen Poe? Although the language might be a bit baroque.
The Codebreakers is a fantastic book and I highly recommend it. I don't know what I think of it for a ten-year-old, it's been a while since I've read it, but my memory is that it is certainly mathematically accessible, but its length and depth may make it daunting, as it probably exceeds the attention horizon of a typical ten-year-old by an order of magnitude or two. But in chunks it could work, and for an adult it's fantastic.
I would suggest Real-World Cryptography by DAVID WONG. It has good introduction covering basic primitives like various hash functions, MAC, KDF, then sym/asym, and so on, all the way to PQC and protocols design. A nice intro book, maybe your 10 y.o. will find it interesting. P.S. In fact, I was going to send that book to my friend's son who is about same age, and who got some sudden interest in cryptography recently. So it is safe to say that I am now aware of at least two 10 year olds who have interest in Cryptography. I feel a bit surprised, but in a good way :)
- yobananaboy
One of the books that got me interested in cryptography as a kid was Artemis Fowl! It might be too simple for him now, but the gnommish (glyph substitution cipher) on every page was really fun for me to figure out.
- mlyle
There's an edition of The Code Book for youth: https://www.amazon.com/clp/0385900325?lv=shuf&channelId=500
- jedberg
Don't forget about the NSAs CryptoKids!
https://web.archive.org/web/20100128072801/http://www.nsa.go...
(They went offline a few administrations ago, hence the archive link)
You can also jump around the timeline in the archive to see different versions.
- vmilner
https://wearethemutants.com/2018/07/05/usbornes-the-knowhow-... always fun.
(used copies still available)
- fyltr
should you and your kid speak french or spanish, "la bible des codes secrets" by Hervé Lehning, the bible of secret codes, is a book I greatly enjoyed as a young teen. it walks you through the history of cryptography until the current times, and has a lot of examples where you can try it out yourself. it is almost not coding-oriented, with only the last 3 chapters explaining modern-day encryption, but as far as my experience goes, few ten-year old enjoy reading documentation or textbook-style books. This one is very didactic, and also an interestin tour through history.