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"This is an interesting, entertaining, and well-composed book. ... The scope of the exposition is grandiose: from the Bible to epic Greek poems, from Kama-sutra to Casanova, from Julius Caesar to Roger Bacon, from Shakespeare to Edgar Allan Poe, from ancient Egypt, India, China to our times. Short biographies of a quantity of people who contributed to the development of the concepts and techniques related to codes, as well as the general historical background provide the human side of the field and immensely enhance the exposition. ... It is useful for the reader that the book contains some mathematical foundations for better understanding the main topics. These foundations are given in Appendices A and E. Basic algorithms for cryptography and cryptanalysis are considered in Appendices B, C, D, and F. It was a good idea to collect all exercises in the Appendix G as it makes reading easier for a general reader, while enabling university and college faculty to use the book in teaching courses in crptography and cryptanalysis. To conclude it is worth mentioning that all sections of the book are decorated with beautiful quotations. So, the words of Samuel Johnson, "Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world", used as an epigraph to Section 1.2, may be truly applied to the author of this book." M.S. Bugin (UCLA)
-- From MAA Reviews.
"Mollin's thick tome (679 pages) tells the story of codes and code breaking from antiquity to the future. It is full of engaging detail on the many personalities that have been drawn to this branch of applied mathematics. Did you know Elizabeth Friedman, wife of the founding NSA cryptologist William Friedman, got her own start in cryptanalysis breaking codes of Depression-era rum runners? There are enough such historical tangents that one can get a good feel for the human story of cryptology from Caesar's classic cipher to the promise of quantum cryptology without skipping over much mathematics. Further reaches are probed with the rather judicious use of footnotes...this book is a self-contained guide to the subject covering material from basic arithmetic to the foundations of group theory and probability... Among books at this level, this one stands out for some of its vivid examples. Particularly enlightening is the discussion of quantum computing: rather than merely touching on the subject, Mollin provides a partiularly illustrative and detailed example...Mollin also places the application of cryptology in context. Of course, in this day and age, that largely means the Internet and its many opportunities for information to be compromised. So after antique techniques, he discusses symmetric- and public-key cryptography and how the Internet was made more secure examining protocols from SSL to electronic voting...Mollin also devotes two chapters on such topics as information theory and codes, viruses and their ilk, and legal issues..." (Tom Shulte of Oakland University, Rochester, MI).
From the Preface: "This book has been written with a broad spectrum of readers in minnd, which includes anyone interested in "secrecy" and related issues. Thus, this is a tome for the merely curious, as well as the history-minded reader, the amateur mathematician, engineers, bankers, academics, students, those practitioners working incryptography, specialists in the field, and instructors wanting to use the book for a text in a course on a variety of topics related to"codes". We will look at this topic from all aspects including not only those related to cryptography (the study of methods for sending messages in secret), but also the notion of"codes" as removal of noise from telephone channels, satellite signals, CDs and the like."
It starts with two chapters on the history of the subject, beginning with the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete 4,000 years ago and moves through the modern day. Subsequent chapters provide explicit descriptions of the most up-to-date ciphers, including Blowfish, Rijndael, RC4, and other stream ciphers. There is also a full accounting of public-key cryptography including, RSA, ElGamal, and digital signatures. There is a chapter on cryptographic protocols including, identification, commitment, secret sharing, electronic voting, protocol layers and SSL, as well as digital cash schemes. Key management in detail is covered with attention to authentication, exchange, distribution, and an overview of PKI. Message authentication is covered with an eye to authentication functions, authentication codes, encryption functions, and applications. E-Mail topics are covered such as, PGP, S/MIME, IPSec, Firewalls, Client-Server models and cookies, as well as a history of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Modern-day concerns are covered, such as cyber-crime, hackers, computer viruses, copyright issues including music downloads, and modern technology such as in smart cards, wireless phones, and biometrics. E-commerce is covered in great detail with SET, SSL, RC4, and other protocols, which have become standards on the Internet. The concluding eleventh chapter is devoted to Information Theory, and Error-Correcting Codes.
There are seven appendices with topics including, background on mathematical facts: sets, relations and functions, basic and modular arithmetic, groups, fields, modules, rings, vector spaces, basic matrix theory, continued fractions, elliptic curves, and complexity theory in Appendix A. There is pseudo-random number generation in Appendix B including: ANSI X9.17 and the Blum-Blum-Shub generator. Appendix C covers factoring including: classical methods, the continued fraction algorithm, Pollard's p-1 algorithm, as well as his rho method, the quadratic sieve, and the multipolynomial quadratic sieve, the elliptic curve method, and the general number field sieve. Appendix D covers technical and advanced details: AES, Silver-Pohlig-Hellman, Baby-Step Giant-Step and the index-calculus algorithm, Brand's digital cash scheme, and radix-64 encoding. Probability theory is the topic of Appendix E including: basic methods, random variables, expectation and variance, binomial distribution, the law of large numbers, and error-detection. Appendix F is devoted to recognizing primes: primality and compositness tests, Miller-Selfridge-Rabin, Primes is in P, and generation of random primes. The last appendix has just under 400 exercises for all chapters so an instructor may use the book as a text in a course or variety of courses. It also serves as a mechanism for an individual to test their understanding of the topics covered, including many puzzles to be solved for sheer interest.
The index has nearly 5,000 entries for easy access to any topic, and the extensive bibliography, with nearly 300 entries for further reading, ensures the reader will have the best of all possible references. Moreover, the bibliography has the page reference of each and every entry --- exactly where it is cited in text. This is a feature not often seen in the literature, but is very useful for the reader. At roughly 700 pages, it will be the only source book you need, with virtually any topic you want on the subject covered.
Table of Contents in pdf format.
June 20, 2009