ISM/NSO received the manuscript of 'Cryptography: Theory and Practice' Author is Doug Stinson (Comp. Science/Eng. dept. University of Nebraska). Publisher is CRC Press Inc. Pages: 434 Chapters: 13 Format: Hardbound trimmed book 8,5 x 5,5 ISBN: not available yet Expected release: within 3 months Price: not available yet Preliminary review (a full review will be published in Internet Security Monthly) The book starts - obvious - with classical cryptography. Hopping from shift cipher, to substitution, to affine, to vigenere, to hill, to permutation, and ending in the range of simple cryptosystems with stream ciphers. A mature subchapter is devoted to cryptanalysis, covering the affine, the substitution and the vigenere. And providing a known plaintext attack on the hill cipher. The subchapter ends with the cryptanalysis of the LFSR-based stream cipher. A next chapter discusses in depth Shannon's theory. This is followed by the inevitable discussion of the DES, its modes of operation and includes an attack on a 3 round DES, and an attack on a 6 round DES. Chapter 4 discusses RSA and factoring. Touching also the not much discussed Chinese Remainder theorem.. The Rabin scheme is reviewed. And within factoring Doug pays attention to Dixon's Algorithm and the quadratic sieve. Of course other public key cryptosystems, as El Gamal, finite field, Merkle Hellman and McEliece are discussed. Doug explains signature schemes, as El Gamal and DSS and touches undeniable and fail-stop. In Hash functions, after the basics, among others MD4 and timestamping are issues of interest. In key distribution and key agreement Blom's scheme, D-H, Kerberos, station to station, MIT key agreement are noteworthy stops. Another chapter goes into identification scheme's discussing Schnorr, Okamoto, Guillou-Quisquater, and a general overview of conversion processes from identification to signature. In authentication codes a good discussion on computing deception probabilities, and combinatorial bounds. In the latter orthogonal arrays are a topic of interest. Doug also views the entropy bounds on deception probabilities. A next chapter introduces the Shamir treshold, the monotone circuit construction and Ernie Brickell's vector space, among others. A separate chapter is devoted to pseudo-random numbers, giving examples. The indistinguishable probability distributions and the Blum/Blum/Shub generator are noteworthy. Extra attention for probabilistic encryption. As common fur the subject, close to the end of the book, zero-knowledge proofs are discussed in depth. The book is basically organized in three parts: private key cryptography, public key cryptography and the introduction to four active research area's. It's comprehensive in the 'core' area's of cryptography. Although Cryptography: Theory and Practice is a text book, it certainly provides researchers and practitioners in the field with material on less discussed topics, and certainly invites for the development of new idea's. The work contains also a comprehensive reference section and the good workable index. Each chapter ends with exercise material. For the reader: It is necessary to have at least some familiarity with basic linear algebra and modular arithmetic. Compliments to Doug Stinson who sat many hours behind his terminal to get it all straightened out, and to a professional publisher that is up to the job of putting it all in print in such a layout that student, researcher and professional are encouraged. 11 February 1995 Internet Security Monthly Network Security Observations Editorial Office ------ Note: if you want to copy this short review, distribute it on the net, please do so at will. This review is not copyrighted. If you want more information on the book, consider sending us an email. ------