News in the Category "Applied Cryptography"
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Uncryptic Look at Cryptography
With the world accelerating onto the information superhighway, protection of data’s secrecy and correctness takes on increasing importance. The best tool for that protection is cryptography, a very old tool. Despite the importance and maturity of cryptography, few good reference books accessible to nontheorists have been published. This book is a great resource for the software professional who wants to know more about the subject.
Bruce Schneier covers three cryptographic topics of interest to the software professional: protocols, techniques, and algorithms. Additionally, the book contains C source code for many of the algorithms. Few software professionals will want to read the 600-page book cover to cover, but cryptography is so subtle and interconnected that it is worthwhile to at least skim the entire book and then return to study the parts of most immediate interest…
Applied Cryptography by Schneier
For anyone who wants to study cryptography, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort by getting Schneier’s book. From the simple Caesar cipher to RSA and beyond, there is nothing the book doesn’t at least touch on. Protocols, techniques, algorithms, and even source code are included. A “Real World” section looks both at specific implementations and at the politics of encryption.
Schneier notes that his work is *not* a mathematical text. It is difficult to say how much of a shortcoming this is for any given reader, but a safe bet is “not much”. For those who do need more rigorous treatments of specific topics, the bibliography lists almost a thousand references, all of which are described and cited within the book text at some point…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.