If you’ve ever picked up a war novel, you know they tend to deal with the exploits of soldiers and sailors, the dirt and danger of the front lines. Not Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon.” This ...

For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You’d scramble the message using a special rule, known only to you and your intended audience.

Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the security of modern encryption. Any clever trick for solving them ...