cryptography

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.
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.
Crack codes, solve a mystery and even win prizes in the University of Southampton's National Cipher Challenge.
Fame, glory, and more importantly prizes are on offer in the National Cipher Challenge.
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.
Today's digital world with its free flow of information, would not exist without cryptography to guarantee our privacy. Plus meets mathematician, author and broadcaster Simon Singh to find out about the science of secrecy.