crypto-for-kids | A cryptography book for kids

crypto-for-kids is a HTML library. crypto-for-kids has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

This project is a dumping ground for texts that will one day form a cryptography book for kids. The target age group is 11+. According to Piaget, kids in concrete operational stage, aged 7-11, learn to understand a perspective other than one's own. Once they are done with that the door is open to understanding cryptography which, by it nature, requires looking at conflicts from persepectives of different participants. That being said, 95% of the grown-ups know nothing about cryptography, maybe except for its name. Furthermore, 99.9% have no idea that some special kind of thinking is required, one that doesn't come naturally and which may be useful even in everyday situations that have nothing to do with cryptography. Therefore, it would be nice if the book, while primarily focused on children, would be digestible by grown-ups. The goal of the book is to avoid as much technical detail as possible and focus on basic principles and the kind of twisted thinking needed for cryptography. As such the book will also touch adjacent subjects such as game theory, psychology, maths, economics, history, opsec, stage magic, you name it. The book itself is going to be a mystery, a puzzle, a labyrinth. It will be split into small pieces and the correct ordering of the pieces will be revealed only by solving little cryptographical puzzles. One story may look, for example, like this: First, something impossible happens. Then the reader will be told: "How is that possible?" or "You now have enough information to solve the mystery yourself!" The final part of the story will resolve the mystery, but there's a catch. The reference to the final part will be encrypted, obfuscated or maybe steganographically hidden. To give a trivial example: "Continue reading at section 54 mod 7!". Structuring the stories like this has an educational value. Namely, if you want to teach something to someone, exercises are needed. But people tend to skip exercises. I, for one, do. This way the reader will be forced to do the exercise to be able to continue reading. The system also enforces the rules of the game. The reader cannot skip stuff or start reading from the middle. First, you cannot pick a chapter and find the previous one. Technically, this works like a one-way function. Given that the chapters are unordered and the only link between two subsequent chapters is a command at the end of the first chapter (e.g. "Go to section 135!") you would have to search through the entire book to find the previous chapter. But even if the book is digitalized and allows for automated searching, looking for "135" is not going to find anything if the command is "Go to section 324 mod 189!". Second, picking a chapter from the middle of the book and trying to move forward is not going to work. Specifically, if the puzzle at the end of the chapter requires a skill that wasn't taught in that chapter, there's no way to find the next chapter.