About the Book

Overview

Cryptography has crept into everything, from web browsers and email programs to cell phones, bank cards, cars and even into medical implants. Thus, an increasing number of people have to understand how crypto schemes work and how they can be used in practice. We wanted to create a book that teaches modern applied cryptography to readers with a technical background but without an education in pure mathematics. It is a perfect choice for teaching introductory course in cryptography to engineering and computer science students at the undergraduate or beginning graduate level. Due to its strong focus on practical issues such as standardized ciphers, state-of-the-art security recommendations and implementation issues, the book is also especially useful for practitioners in industry who want to learn about modern security mechanisms.

The book teaches virtually all modern crypto schemes of practical relevance, including the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), DES and 3DES, RSA, elliptic curves, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, Digital Signature Algorithms, ECDSA and the SHA hash function family. Protocols and key establishment methods, including certificates and public-key infrastructure, are also introduced. Timely topics such as lightweight ciphers for RFIDs and mobile devices are treated as well.