Practical Cryptography
   HOME





Practical Cryptography
Books on cryptography have been published sporadically and with variable quality for a long time. This is despite the paradox that secrecy is of the essence in sending confidential messages – see Kerckhoffs' principle. In contrast, the revolutions in cryptography and secure communications since the 1970s are covered in the available literature. Early history An early example of a book about cryptography was a Roman work, now lost and known only by references. Many early cryptographic works were esoteric, mystical, and/or reputation-promoting; cryptography being mysterious, there was much opportunity for such things. At least one work by Trithemius was banned by the Catholic Church and put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum as being about black magic or witchcraft. Many writers claimed to have invented unbreakable ciphers. None were, though it sometimes took a long while to establish this. In the 19th century, the general standard improved somewhat (e.g., works by Auguste Kerc ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Washington Naval Conference
The Washington Naval Conference (or the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armament) was a disarmament conference called by the United States and held in Washington, D.C., from November 12, 1921, to February 6, 1922. It was conducted outside the auspices of the League of Nations. It was attended by nine nations (the United States, Japan, China, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal) regarding interests in the Pacific Ocean and East Asia. Germany was not invited to the conference, as restrictions on its navy had already been set in the Versailles Treaty. Soviet Russia was also not invited to the conference. It was the first arms control conference in history, and is still studied by political scientists as a model for a successful disarmament movement. Held at Memorial Continental Hall, in Downtown Washington, it resulted in three major treaties: Four-Power Treaty, Five-Power Treaty (more commonly known as the Washington Naval Tre ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Scott Vanstone
Scott A. Vanstone (September 14, 1947 – March 2, 2014) was a mathematician and cryptographer in the University of Waterloo Faculty of Mathematics. He was a member of the school's Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research, and was also a founder of the cybersecurity company Certicom. He received his PhD in 1974 at the University of Waterloo, and for about a decade worked principally in combinatorial design theory, finite geometry, and finite fields. In the 1980s he started working in cryptography. An early result of Vanstone (joint with Ian Blake, R. Fuji-Hara, and Ron Mullin) was an improved algorithm for computing discrete logarithms in binary fields, which inspired Don Coppersmith to develop his famous exp(n^) algorithm (where n is the degree of the field). Vanstone was one of the first to see the commercial potential of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), and much of his subsequent work was devoted to developing ECC algorithms, protocols, and standards. In 1985 he co-foun ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Paul Van Oorschot
Paul C. van Oorschot is a cryptographer and computer security researcher, currently a professor of computer science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, where he held a Canada Research Chair in authentication and computer security over the period 2002-2023. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC). He is best known as a co-author of the ''Handbook of Applied Cryptography'' (), together with Alfred Menezes and Scott Vanstone. He is also the author of ''Computer Security and the Internet: Tools and Jewels from Malware to Bitcoin'' (). Van Oorschot was awarded the 2000 J.W. Graham Medal in Computing Innovation. He also helped organize the first Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) workshop in 1994. Van Oorschot received his Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Waterloo. He was recognized (2016) as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for "contributions to applied cryptography, authentication and computer security." He is also a Fellow of the IEEE (20 ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Alfred Menezes
Alfred Menezes is co-author of several books on cryptography, including the ''Handbook of Applied Cryptography'', and is a professor of mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada."Alfred Menezes: Mini-biography"
Certicom company website


Education

Alfred Menezes' family is from , a state in western India, but he was born in and grew up in

picture info

Data Encryption Standard
The Data Encryption Standard (DES ) is a symmetric-key algorithm for the encryption of digital data. Although its short key length of 56 bits makes it too insecure for modern applications, it has been highly influential in the advancement of cryptography. Developed in the early 1970s at IBM and based on an earlier design by Horst Feistel, the algorithm was submitted to the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) following the agency's invitation to propose a candidate for the protection of sensitive, unclassified electronic government data. In 1976, after consultation with the National Security Agency (NSA), the NBS selected a slightly modified version (strengthened against differential cryptanalysis, but weakened against brute-force attacks), which was published as an official Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for the United States in 1977. The publication of an NSA-approved encryption standard led to its quick international adoption and widespread academic scrutiny. C ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Yehuda Lindell
Yehuda Lindell (born 24 February 1971) is an Israeli professor in the Department of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University where he conducts research on cryptography with a focus on the theory of secure computation and its application in practice. Lindell currently leads the cryptography team at Coinbase. Education and academic positions Lindell received a BSc and Msc degree in computer science from Bar-Ilan University. He then obtained a PhD in computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2002. Lindell received a Raviv Fellowship and spent two years at IBM's cryptography research group at the T.J. Watson Research Center. In 2004, he returned to Israel to take up an academic position at Bar-Ilan University. Lindell's work on secure computation was recognized by the award of an ERC starting grant in 2009 and an ERC consolidators grant in 2014. Lindell was appointed as an IACR Fellow in 2021. Industry experience Lindell worked from 2004 to 2014 as a permanent cry ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Jonathan Katz (computer Scientist)
Jonathan Katz is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland who conducts research on cryptography and cybersecurity. In 2019–2020 he was a faculty member in the Volgenau School of Engineering at George Mason University, where he held the title of Eminent Scholar in Cybersecurity. In 2013–2019 he was director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center at the University of Maryland. Biography Katz received BS degrees in mathematics and chemistry from MIT in 1996, followed by a master's degree in chemistry from Columbia University in 1998. After transferring to the computer science department, he received M.Phil. and PhD degrees in computer science from Columbia University in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Katz's doctoral advisors were Zvi Galil, Moti Yung, and Rafail Ostrovsky. While in graduate school, he worked as a research scientist at Telcordia Technologies (now ACS). Katz was on the faculty in the computer science department of the Unive ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Oded Goldreich
Oded Goldreich (; born 1957) is a professor of computer science at the faculty of mathematics and computer science of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. His research interests lie within the theory of computation and are, specifically, the interplay of randomness and computation, the foundations of cryptography, and computational complexity theory. He won the Knuth Prize in 2017 and was selected in 2021 to receive the Israel Prize in mathematics. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Biography Goldreich received a DSc in computer science at Technion in 1983 under Shimon Even. Goldreich has contributed to the development of pseudorandomness, zero knowledge proofs, secure function evaluation, property testing,Oded Goldreich, Shafi Goldwasser, and Dana Ron. 1998 Property Testing and its connection to Learning and Approximation. ''Journal of the ACM'', pages 653-750. and other areas in cryptography and computational complexity. Goldr ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


American Cryptogram Association
The American Cryptogram Association (ACA) is an American non-profit organization devoted to the hobby of cryptography, with an emphasis on types of codes, ciphers, and cryptograms that can be solved either with pencil and paper, or with computers, but not computer-only systems. History The ACA was formed on September 1, 1930. Since some of its members had belonged to the “ National Puzzlers' League”, some of the NPL terminology ("nom," "Krewe," etc.) is also used in the ACA.History ACA


Publications and activities

The association has a collection of books and articles on cryptography and related subjects in the library at . An annual convention takes place in lat ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Helen Fouché Gaines
Helen Fouché Gaines (October 12, 1888 – April 2, 1940) was a member of the American Cryptogram Association and editor of the book ''Cryptanalysis'' (originally ''Elementary Cryptanalysis'') first published in 1939. The book described the principal cryptographic systems of the 19th century and cracking methods including elementary contact analysis (cryptanalysis). Her pen name A pen name or nom-de-plume is a pseudonym (or, in some cases, a variant form of a real name) adopted by an author and printed on the title page or by-line of their works in place of their real name. A pen name may be used to make the author's na ... was PICCOLA. Shortly after the publication of the book, she died. Publications * References External links ACA history of the book from ''The ACA and you''Official ACA site
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Bruce Schneier
Bruce Schneier (; born January 15, 1963) is an American cryptographer, computer security professional, privacy specialist, and writer. Schneier is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society as of November, 2013. He is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, and The Tor Project; and an advisory board member of Electronic Privacy Information Center and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and cryptography and is a squid enthusiast. Early life and education Bruce Schneier is the son of Martin Schneier, a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge. He grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, attending P.S. 139 and Hunter College High School. After receiving a physics bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester in 1984, he went to American University in Washington, D.C., and got his ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]