Secret Colors

Secret Colors is a gentle introduction to cryptography. With hand-drawn imagery and gentle explanations of cryptography concepts, this book will captivate beginners of all ages and backgrounds.

The annual autumn dance is being held in the forest, and two bunnies are deciding who they will ask to the dance. As they pass notes between each other in class, they realize they need a way of keeping their messages secret. They develop a technique that allows them to securely talk to each other without any chance of other bunnies listening in on their conversation. In doing so, the bunnies give us a memorable example of symmetric-key encryption and key exchange protocols that readers will find fascinating and useful.

Martin Kleppmann is a researcher in distributed systems and security at the University of Cambridge, and author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications (O'Reilly Media, 2017). Previously he was a software engineer and entrepreneur at Internet companies including LinkedIn and Rapportive, where he worked on large-scale data infrastructure. He is now working on TRVE DATA, a project that aims to bring end-to-end encryption and decentralisation to a wide range of applications.

Mitch Seymour is a software engineer, author, and illustrator. He is the founder of Round Robin Publishing and enjoys making technical concepts accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds. His publications include Mastering Kafka Streams and ksqlDB (O'Reilly Media, 2021) and Gently Down the Stream: A Gentle Introduction to Apache Kafka (Round Robin Publishing, 2021).