Contemporary Cryptology: The Science of Information Integrity

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 656 pages
• Published by: Wiley-IEEE Press
• Edition: 1st Edition January 27, 1999
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0780353528
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0780353527
• Book Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.5 x 1.4 inches
• Weighs: 2.5 pounds

Product Review
Contemporary Cryptology: The Science of Information Integrity is a compilation of essays on cryptography that is organized around central topics within the field of encryption over the last two decades. The text collects influential essays by pioneers in the field, including Whitfield Diffie, a trailblazer of public key cryptography.

The book includes sections on the Data Encryption Standard (DES), digital signatures, authentication, protocols, and cryptanalysis or code breaking. Of particular interest is the chapter on smart cards, which explores the possibilities of hardware and software for digital cash and other applications. As a document of recent research in the field, this text will prove useful for the general reader as well as the specialist. Several essays present the math behind cryptographic applications, but there is much to mine here for the curious reader. Contemporary Cryptology also includes several bibliographies on the subject of cryptography and related fields. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description
The field of cryptography has experienced an unprecedented development in the past decade and the contributors to this book have been in the forefront of these developments. In an information-intensive society, it is essential to devise means to accomplish, with information alone, every function that it has been possible to achieve in the past with documents, personal control, and legal protocols (secrecy, signatures, witnessing, dating, certification of receipt and/or origination). This volume focuses on all these needs, covering all aspects of the science of information integrity, with an emphasis on the cryptographic elements of the subject.

In addition to being an introductory guide and survey of all the latest developments, this book provides the engineer and scientist with algorithms, protocols, and applications. Of interest to computer scientists, communications engineers, data management specialists, cryptographers, mathematicians, security specialists, network engineers.

Reader Reviews
Unlike most books on cryptology, this one tries to give a broad overview not only of conventional ciphers and cryptanalysis, but also of authentication, protocols, zero-knowledge proofs and other aspects of modern cryptology. It is slightly out of date, having been published in 1993, but not seriously so. The editor, Gus Simmons, is a heavyweight researcher who worked for many years at Sandia Labs on such topics as public key ciphers and their uses and weaknesses, and cryptologic methods for ensuring against cheating in certain types of treaties. He wrote the article on cryptology for the 16th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. All the contributors are also experts in their specialties. The resulting book requires considerable knowledge of math, computer science and cryptology to understand fully, but it is well worth reading for those who can wade through it. The 14 chapters will not all be equally interesting to all readers; to me, for example, Joan Feigenbaum's "Overview of Interactive Proof Systems and Zero-Knowledge", the chapter on "Cryptanalysis: A Survey of Recent Results" by E. F. Brickell and Andrew Odlyzko, and "Protocol Failures in Cryptosystems" by J. H. Moore, are particularly interesting because they gave me a coherent picture of three topics in which I had encountered various results and had fragmentary knowledge. Other readers may have different favorites, but there's something here for almost anyone. My only criticism is that the chapter on "The Data Encryption Standard: Past and Future" by Miles Smid and Dennis Branstad, is disingenuous, and seems to me misleading in some respects. For example, it fails to mention several features of the DES standard itself, and it fails to point out the most serious vulnerability of software implementations of DES (which should be implemented in hardware to be secure, as the standard notes.) The chapter also fuzzes up the role of NSA in dealing with both IBM and NBS. In particular, it doesn't make clear that NSA found a weakness in IBM's original "Lucifer" cipher, and guided IBM in removing the weakness. Nor does it even hint that NBS, which was supposedly the chooser and promulgator of the DES standard, was in no position to exercise independent judgment on the matter; the chief technical consultant to NBS about DES was Arthur J. Levenson, who although nominally retired from NSA at the time, could still be most easily reached in his NSA office at Fort Meade, not at NBS, and not at IBM's Federal Systems Division, where he had nominally gone after "retiring" from NSA. This is not a criticism of DES, which is a remarkably good cipher; it is a grumble that almost twenty years after the events described in this chapter, the authors still felt it necessary to fuzz up the history of the topic, which at least Dennis Branstad was intimately familiar with. Except for this one complaint, I find the entire book admirable. Comment | | (Report this)