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This unique, award winning book offers a thorough yet accessible treatment of both the mathematics and history of cryptology. Requiring minimal mathematical perparation, the book presents the mathematics in sufficient detail and weaves the history throughout the chapters. In addition to the fascinating historical and political sides of cryptology, the author-a former Scholar-in-Residence at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) Center for Cryptologic History-includes interesting instances of codes and ciphers in crime, literature, music, and art. The book helps further enlivens the already extremely popular field of cryptology.
List of contents
Part I: Classical Cryptology 1. Monoalphabetic Substitution Ciphers, or MASCs: Disguises for Messages 2. Simple Progression to an Unbreakable Cipher 3. Transposition Ciphers 4. Shakespeare, Jefferson, and JFK 5. World War I and Herbert O. Yardley 6. Matrix Encryption 7. World War II: The Enigma of Germany 8. Cryptologic War against Japan 9. SIGABA: World War II Defense 10. Enciphering Speech
Part II: Modern Cryptology 11. Claude Shannon 12. National Security Agency 13. The Data Encryption Standard 14. The Birth of Public Key Cryptography 15. Attacking RSA 16. Primality Testing and Complexity Theory 17. Authenticity 18. Pretty Good Privacy and Bad Politics 19. Stream Ciphers 20. Suite B All-Stars 21. Toward Tomorrow
About the author
Craig P. Bauer is an associate professor of mathematics at York College of Pennsylvania and the editor-in-chief of Cryptologia. He was the 2011-2012 Scholar-in-Residence at the National Security Agency (NSA) Center for Cryptologic History, where he wrote several papers for NSA journals, gave numerous lectures, and made substantial progress on a second book focused on unsolved codes and ciphers. He earned a PhD in mathematics at North Carolina State University.
