David Kahn is a US historian, journalist and writer. He has written extensively on the history of cryptography and military intelligence and related subjects.

Kahn's first book was The Codebreakers (1967), widely considered a definitive account of the history of cryptography, up to the early 1960s. In particular, the story of cryptography in World War II was still then effectively classified. The most recent edition, published in 1996, has an additional chapter surveying with less depth events and breakthroughs in cryptology since the first edition, such as the advent of public key cryptography and PGP.

Kahn traces his interest in cryptography to reading Fletcher Pratt's Secret and Urgent as a boy. Kahn is a founding editor of the Cryptologia journal.

Kahn was awarded a doctorate (DPhil) from Oxford University in 1974. He worked as a reporter and an op-ed editor for Newsday until 1998, and journalism for a few years at New York University. In 1995, Kahn was selected as the scholar in residence at the National Security Agency.

External links

• Homepage.
• Biographical information
• The man behind 'The Codebreakers — How David Kahn brought cryptology in from the cold