Cryptography: Theory and Practice, 4th Edition

From the CRC Press web page:

Through three editions, Cryptography: Theory and Practice has been embraced by instructors and students alike. It offers a comprehensive primer for the subject's fundamentals while presenting the most current advances in cryptography.

The authors offer comprehensive, in-depth treatment of the methods and protocols that are vital to safeguarding the seemingly infinite and increasing amount of information circulating around the world.

Key Features of the Fourth Edition:

  • New chapter on the exciting, emerging new area of post-quantum cryptography (Chapter 9).
  • New high-level, nontechnical overview of the goals and tools of cryptography (Chapter 1).
  • New mathematical appendix that summarizes definitions and main results on number theory and algebra (Appendix A).
  • An expanded treatment of stream ciphers, including common design techniques along with coverage of Trivium.
  • Interesting attacks on cryptosystems, including:
    • padding oracle attack
    • correlation attacks and algebraic attacks on stream ciphers
    • attack on the DUAL-EC random bit generator that makes use of a trapdoor.
  • A treatment of the sponge construction for hash functions and its use in the new SHA-3 hash standard.
  • Methods of key distribution in sensor networks.
  • The basics of visual cryptography, allowing a secure method to split a secret visual message into pieces (shares) that can later be combined to reconstruct the secret.
  • The fundamental techniques cryptocurrencies, as used in Bitcoin and blockchain.
  • The basics of the new methods employed in messaging protocols such as Signal, including deniability and Diffie-Hellman key ratcheting.