A Cryptography Primer
Secrets and Promises

This accessible introduction for undergraduates explains the cryptographic protocols for privacy and the use of digital signatures for certifying the integrity of messages and programs.

Philip N. Klein (Author)

9781107017887, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 March 2014

186 pages, 72 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.5 x 1.8 cm, 0.42 kg

Cryptography has been employed in war and diplomacy from the time of Julius Caesar. In our Internet age, cryptography's most widespread application may be for commerce, from protecting the security of electronic transfers to guarding communication from industrial espionage. This accessible introduction for undergraduates explains the cryptographic protocols for achieving privacy of communication and the use of digital signatures for certifying the validity, integrity, and origin of a message, document, or program. Rather than offering a how-to on configuring web browsers and e-mail programs, the author provides a guide to the principles and elementary mathematics underlying modern cryptography, giving readers a look under the hood for security techniques and the reasons they are thought to be secure.

1. Introduction
2. Modular arithmetic
3. The addition cypher, an insecure block cypher
4. Functions
5. Probability theory
6. Perfect secrecy and perfectly secure cryptosystems
7. Number theory
8. Euclid's algorithm
9. Some uses of perfect secrecy
10. Computational problems, easy and hard
11. Modular exponentiation, modular logarithm, and one-way functions
12. Diffie and Hellman's exponential-key-agreement protocol
13. Computationally secure single-key cryptosystems
14. Public-key cryptosystems and digital signatures.

Subject Areas: Data encryption [URY], Computer security [UR], Computing & information technology [U], Coding theory & cryptology [GPJ]