cryptography

Blockchain: Spreading trust

Bitcoin is a digital currency that isn't regulated by any kind of central authority. The structure which allows this decentralisation is called blockchain. But how, and how well, does it work?

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Coding with linear codes (or how to avoid being eaten by crocodiles)

Can you encode a message so that errors in transmission are automatically corrected?

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Maths in a minute: Maths and communication

A quick look at the role of mathematics in communication — from making and breaking codes to making sure messages arrive intact.

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Staying anonymous

A team of computer scientists has found a weakness in the world's most popular anonymity service.

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Elliptic cryptography

How a special kind of curve can keep your data safe.

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From Arsenal to RSA: An interview with Marcus du Sautoy

Marcus du Sautoy talks about football, cryptography, and numbers.

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Putting Turing on stage: The podcast

The universal machine is a musical about Alan Turing, the mathematician and WWII code breaker who was convicted of homosexuality in the 1950s, chemically castrated as a result, and died young in mysterious circumstances. How do you turn such a story, and the maths in it, into a musical? We talked to writer and director David Byrne, Richard Delaney, who plays Turing, and Assistant Director Natalie York.

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CAPTCHA chaos
If you are prone to forgetting your passwords, you're not alone. To make sure we remember all our passwords, many of us take measures that defeat the purpose. These include, as studies have shown, using the same password for everything or writing them down on post-it notes and sticking them to our computer. But such sloppiness makes easy work for evil agents out to steal our data and identities. Now physicists from the US and Germany have devised a safer way of using passwords that takes account of the human need for memorability.
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Alan Turing: ahead of his time
Alan Turing is the father of computer science and contributed significantly to the WW2 effort, but his life came to a tragic end. Stefan Kopieczek explores his story.
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A mathematical mystery begins...
Crack codes, solve a mystery and even win prizes in the University of Southampton's National Cipher Challenge.
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Calling all code crackers
Fame, glory, and more importantly prizes are on offer in the National Cipher Challenge.
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A whirlpool of numbers
The Riemann Hypothesis is probably the hardest unsolved problem in all of mathematics, and one of the most important. It has to do with prime numbers - the building blocks of arithmetic. Nick Mee, together with Sir Arthur C. Clarke, tells us about the patterns hiding inside numbers.
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