Product Description

Cryptography is an outstanding book that covers all the major areas of cryptography in a readable, mathematically precise form. Several chapters deal with especially active areas of research and give the reader a quick introduction and overview of the basic results in the area. Cryptography provides the mathematical theory that is necessary in order to understand how the various systems work. Most algorithms are presented in the form of pseudocode, together with examples and informal discussion of the underlying ideas. The book gives careful and comprehensive treatment of all the essential core areas of cryptography. Also, several chapters present recent topics that have not received thorough treatment in previous textbooks. Such topics include authentication codes, secret sharing schemes, identification schemes, and key distribution.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #284111 in Books
• Published on: 1995-05-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 434 pages

Amazon.com Review
Douglas R. Stinson's Cryptography: Theory and Practice is a mathematically intensive examination of cryptography, including ciphers, the Data Encryption Standard (DES), public key cryptography, one-way hash functions, and digital signatures. Stinson's explication of "zero-sum proofs"--a process by which one person lets another person know that he or she has a password without actually revealing any information--is especially good.

If you are new to the math behind cryptography but want to tackle it, the author covers all of the required background to understand the real mathematics here. Cryptography includes extensive exercises with each chapter and makes an ideal introduction for any math-literate person willing to get acquainted with this material.

Review
About the First Edition:
…If you want an in-depth mathematical treatise…[Cryptography] is probably the most professional resource. It has an excellent introduction to the early systems, including a description of Claude Shannons work…The material on hash functions is very detailed.
-PC Update

My favorite of the current crop of undergraduate books is the second edition of Cryptography: Theory and Practice by Douglas Stinson. … If I were learning/teaching cryptography for the first time to a class of undergraduate math majors, this is the book I would use.
- Bulletin of the AMS

This is … a book that will give the professional the data needed to implement cryptographic software, and the mathematician hints on both code breaking and creating.
- Books-on-Line

About the Author
Stinson; Douglas University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada,

Customer Reviews

Could be a great book .... but it falls short
As other people have pointed out, this is not a mathematics book, and it is not an algorithm (recipies) book. It could be a great book for people that are interested in learning these tools to actually use them, either in a research or product development context (something besides homework). Unfortunately, the number of typos, in key mathematical expressions AND PORTIONS OF THE EXPLANATIONS is staggering. Go to the author's web page and you will find that some chapters, like 4 for example, average more than one typo per page (and some of these 'typos' are full sentences, or math expressions that do not look like anything that is actually printed on the page). If you do not have that errata sheet handy, you will waste a lot of time trying to understand the text, or trying to solve the exercises. If you are trying to learn from this book, without attending a class and without the errata, you will simply give up. It is a real shame because it has all the makings of a great book.

Volume III of the Definitive Work
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.

It packs a lot in a small space
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.