Understanding Cryptography: A Textbook for Students and Practitioners Author: Christof Paar | Language: English | ISBN:
3642041000 | Format: PDF
Understanding Cryptography: A Textbook for Students and Practitioners Description
Cryptography is now ubiquitous – moving beyond the traditional environments, such as government communications and banking systems, we see cryptographic techniques realized in Web browsers, e-mail programs, cell phones, manufacturing systems, embedded software, smart buildings, cars, and even medical implants. Today's designers need a comprehensive understanding of applied cryptography.
After an introduction to cryptography and data security, the authors explain the main techniques in modern cryptography, with chapters addressing stream ciphers, the Data Encryption Standard (DES) and 3DES, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), block ciphers, the RSA cryptosystem, public-key cryptosystems based on the discrete logarithm problem, elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC), digital signatures, hash functions, Message Authentication Codes (MACs), and methods for key establishment, including certificates and public-key infrastructure (PKI). Throughout the book, the authors focus on communicating the essentials and keeping the mathematics to a minimum, and they move quickly from explaining the foundations to describing practical implementations, including recent topics such as lightweight ciphers for RFIDs and mobile devices, and current key-length recommendations.
The authors have considerable experience teaching applied cryptography to engineering and computer science students and to professionals, and they make extensive use of examples, problems, and chapter reviews, while the book’s website offers slides, projects and links to further resources. This is a suitable textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses and also for self-study by engineers.
- Hardcover: 372 pages
- Publisher: Springer; 1st ed. 2010 edition (October 19, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 3642041000
- ISBN-13: 978-3642041006
- Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
It is a summer tradition for me to pick a technical topic, find a textbook that represents the subject from an introductory point of view, and self-study as much of it as I can. This summer, I picked cryptography. After searching all over the place for a decent introductory book on the subject, I stumbled upon this one. Even though it only had 2 reviews at the time, I could tell that it was exactly what I was looking for. After reading the first 6 chapters of this book, all I can say is this: WOW!
Cryptography lies at the intersection of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering. This book borrows ideas from all 3 fields in order to describe the core ideas of cryptography in a surprisingly elegant way. The tone of the book is formal enough so that the book isn't disorganized or overly verbose, but not too formal that it makes the readings a chore.
As stated above, the content of the book is highly organized. The first 5 chapters deal with symmetric algorithms, and the next 5 or so deal with asymmetric algorithms. The last few chapters deal with hash functions and message authentication algorithms. In between highly-technical sections, you will find informal topics that are concerned with general security topics, history, or similar subjects. These sections are a wonderful break from the technical ones, and make this highly technical book read somewhat like a novel.
The figures in this book are wonderful, and really help the reader understand the encryption algorithms more fully. For example, the DES algorithm is somewhat convoluted, but the figures in the chapter make it very simple to see exactly what is happening at each stage of the process. Every permutation, bit slicing operation, and XOR operation is clearly evident from the flow diagrams.
I came across this book on accident. I was googling around for articles by Preneel and found this book, in which he wrote the foreword. Frankly, I hope this book eventually replaces most, if not all of the mainstream texts on cryptography. My only complaint about this book is that I no longer feel like one of the rare geniuses that thoroughly and completely understands cryptography. Thanks to this book, any dummy off the street can understand cryptography nearly as well as I do and they do not need a computer science or math degree. No prerequisite knowledge is required, other than the ability to read but there is plenty of math if you want to study it. (Warning: I might be exaggerating a little. I really enjoy math and might be taking my math skills for granted. Just so I am clear, this is a Math textbook, which means the encryption algorithms are formally defined using math notation. However, the author's explanation of the math & algorithms is the most clear and easy to understand I have ever seen; which to me means, you do not need a strong background in mathematics to understand this material.)
The following categories are scored 1-10. 1 being the lowest, through 10, the highest...
- Readability (i.e. authors style of writing, is he to the point, write clear, how does he approach the topic, does he motivate, etc...)
Score: 10
I personally do not care for analogies in cryptography books. If the author knows what he is talking about and can explain it, there is absolutely no need for stupid analogies. Another thing that drives me crazy is authors that "challenge you to think" too much. They can never get to the point and come right out and tell you something.
Understanding Cryptography: A Textbook for Students and Practitioners Preview
Link
Please Wait...