Cryptography: Theory and Practice, Third Edition (Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications)

This book takes a fairly rigorous mathematical approach to cryptography. It is intended for upper level undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics, computer science and engineering. I suspect only the quite mathematically inclined computer science and engineering students will find this book helpful. This is not a Boy Scout how to do secret messages book, but a book that will give the professional the data needed to implement cryptographic software, and the mathematician hints on both code breaking and creating. This is the third edition of this book. With the second edition, the author got rid of several several subjects that were not right at the core of cryptography, with the intend of doing a second volume. Instead, the art and scienct of cryptography has changed so fast during the past few years that a two volume approach isn't practical. Instead, he has produced this third edition that picks back up many of the subjects from the first edition. All of the material in this edition has been extensively re-written to incorporate the latest theories and practices. In recent years the use of cryptography has increased by several orders of magnitude. Every time we buy something with a credit card, use on line banking, send a password to access e-mail, we use cryptography. With this growth, the interest at software companies, universities, and other places has grown accordingly and this text has become the standard by which others are compared. Highly recommended for the serious student.

The philosophy underlying the previous edition stays the same. The presentation of concepts is rigorous but neither difficult nor trivial, suitable for readers with basic notions of linear algebra. Moreover, new material has been added.Chapter 3, which deals with block ciphers and linear and differential cryptoanalysis, is very well-written. This is the best presentation of such a subject in few pages I have seen until now.Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 have been significantly updated and expanded with concepts and techniques that are fundamental in order to understand current researches and state of knowledge in Cryptography (e.g., random oracle model, semantic security, new attacks against public key cryptosystems, an in-depth introduction to elliptic curve ...).Compared to the previous edition, more emphasys has been given in some parts to security proofs (e.g, chapter 4), and several new exercises have been proposed at the end of each chapter. Other readers have pointed out that there are some typos (the author has made available an errata list on his home page) but I think that the value of the book is not reduced in any way.In my opinion it is a great book for people who want to be introduced to problems, ideas, and techniques used in Cryptography.

If you liked Schneier's book but disliked the way he covers the mathematical background with a lot of hand-waving, then I highly recommend this book. This is where you can learn how it all really works.

A book that tries to cover the theory and practice of cryptography in only four hundred pages has to make a lot of ruthless choices.Professor Stinson wisely concentrates on theory, with a few nods to practice like explaining efficient modular exponentiation.The theoretical material starts with the indispensable foundation of information theory and jumps straight into the operation of commercially important algorithms and their weaknesses. These are short but well done. For example Stinson has the best presentation of differential cryptanalysis that I've seen.The breadth is good, covering most of the important magic that you can work with crypto: secret sharing, key exchange, zero knowledge proofs, etc.Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a discussion of the blinding techniques used in Chaum's digital cash. Maybe that's because they're not yet a major part of the landscape, but then why spend space on the McEliece system?A useful fraction of the book is accessible if you just have high school math, all of it with college math.This would be a fine introduction to crypto.

Very good book if you are interested in criptography and secret maths. Not many publication on this topic are written as clear as this. Other like Neal Koblitz's Book on criptography is a lot harder for people on lower level of maths knowledge. I recomed it to those who want to learn something or for those who want to refresh their memory .