Tortoise
Security through barriers.
Yale University Department of Computer Science
Michael J. Fischer

CS 467: Cryptography and Data Security

Resources, Spring 2005

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Gloves
Gloves from a space suit.
Pupae
Butterflys grow safely inside.
The Jefferson wheel.
JeffersonWheel
An early encoding device.
Entrance to a Ming Dynasty tomb, north of Beijing, China
Approach
A securable approach to an underground tomb.
Warrior
 

Recommended supplementary reading (not required)

Cryptography and Security

  • Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography, Second Edition, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1996, ISBN 0-471-11709-9 (paperback). Contains a wealth of timely information and gives broad coverage of the field. Often glosses over details in favor of readability, and sometimes gets the details wrong. There are also many errors, particularly before the 5th printing. An errata sheet is available at http://www.counterpane.com/ac2errv30.html.

  • Charlie Kaufman, Radia Perlman, and Mike Speciner, Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World, Prentice-Hall PTR, 2002, ISBN 0-13-046019-2. Gives a nice account of practical security issues and motivates much of the material that we will be studying.

  • Douglas R. Stinson, Cryptography: Theory and Practice, Second Edition, CRC Press, Boca Raton, 2002, ISBN 1584882069. Gives a nice treatment of some of the more mathematical and lower-level aspects of cryptography. The opening chapters give a particularly nice account of classical cryptography and cryptanalysis.

  • Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot, and Scott A. Vanstone, Handbook of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, 1997, pp. 816, ISBN 0849385237. This tome has similar coverage to Schneier but is much more rigorous (at the cost of readability). It is an invaluable reference book if you want to actually implement any of these methods.

Privacy and Social Issues

While this is not a social sciences course, the subject matter of this course has major policy implications, particularly with respect to privacy on the internet. The books listed below give some background and insight into social issues that are currently the subject of wide debate.

FAQ's

A very good starting place for general cryptography information is the Crypto Mini-FAQ. It contains links to many other resources, including the now out-of-date (but still useful) 10-part Cryptography FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions). Another good on-line FAQ is maintained at the RSA Labs website.

Gnu Multiprecision Arithmetic Package (GMP)

This package contains efficient routines for performing arbitrary-precision arithmetic. The functions most relevant for this course are the mpz functions, which operate on large signed integers.

Relevant Newsgroups

The unmoderated newsgroup sci.crypt contains mixture of postings on a wide variety of crypto-related topics.
The moderated newsgroup sci.crypt.research has low volume and technically focused postings.

Other Resources on the Web

Ron Rivest (the "R" of RSA) maintains an index of links to a wealth of information on cryptography and security.

The USACM Encryption Policy Library contains pointers to policy debates, position papers, and pending legislation concerning encryption and computer security.

Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Systems publishes a monthly cryptograpy newsletter, Crypto-gram. This is a good source of news on the current state of computer security and cryptography policy.

The DES Standard at the NIST web site.

Last modified: Fri Feb 4 21:31:23 EST 2005

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