ICS 280, Winter'04

Textbooks and Background Readings

There is no required textbook for this class.  However, some material is luckily available on-line. Here are the pointers to both on-line and off-line background material for our class. (The list I'm giving here started by editing a list compiled by Tal Malkin for the "intro to crypto" class she teaches at Columbia.)

Main reference, available on-line:

S. Goldwasser and M. Bellare: Lecture Notes on Cryptography.  This is the closest thing to a "text book" for this class.  These are notes from a summer cryptography class given by profs. Shafi Goldwasser and Mihir Bellare at MIT.  The treatment here is focused on the theoretical foundations of cryptography.  This is similar to our approach in this class, although on a more advanced level and sometimes in a different order.  I very much encourage you to look into this text for reference.

Other cryptography lecture notes available on-line:

The following collections of lecture notes take a (more or less) similar approach to the one we take in this class (except of Bellare/Rogaway notes which emphasize symmetric setting more than we will).  

• M. Bellare and P. Rogaway:  Lecture Notes for a graduate cryptography course at UCSD.  The approach here is still aimed towards precise definitions and provable security, although more emphasis is given to practical considerations.
• T. Malkin: Lecture Notes. These are lecture notes from Tal Malkin's Intro to Crypto class she taught at Columbia this fall. They are less polished then the first two above, but the arrangement of the material is closer to our class.
• J. Katz: Lecture Notes. These are lecture notes from the Intro to Crypto class Jonathan Katz thought last year at University of Maryland.
• The link to a graduate Intro to Crypto class of Yevgeni Dodis at NYU contains a very good writeup of Yevgeni's lectures on this topic (click "Lecture Summaries")

Cryptography Texts available on-line and as books:

Oded Goldreich's notes for his Foundation of Cryptography book are available on-line.  Oded's work is a comprehensive treatment of the theoretical foundations of cryptography and it covers the material in far greater depth that our class.  It is recommended as a background reading, especially for students who are interested in conducting research in cryptography.

• Foundations of Cryptography (Fragments of a Book). This the the on-line material which is superseded by Volume I of Oded's Foundation of Cryptography which appeared in print and is available in the UCI science library.
• Foundations, volume II. The material of the second part of the book, which will appear in print this coming spring, is available on-line at the bottom of this page.

The following is a comprehensive reference book for all areas in cryptography. It has a less careful approach to definitions and proofs of security than we do, but it is a very good reference text.  It is available chapter by chapter from the book website:

• A.J. Menezes, P.C. van Oorschot, and S.A. Vanstone: Handbook of Applied Cryptography 

Other Cryptography Texts available in print:

• W. Mao: Modern Cryptography: Theory and Practice.  This is a very recent book which is oriented towards a theoretical treatment of cryptography.  Its theoretical treatment is much less detailed than Oded's Foundations, but it is a good introduction to the subject, and it balances the theory with more practice.  It is very much recommended as a background reading for this class.
• D. R. Stinson:  Cryptography: Theory and Practice (2nd edition).  This is a good reference book, but it does not cover the cryptographic theory in a systematic way which is the focus of our class.

On the opposite end of the theory-vs-practice spectrum, the following book presents only a very intuitive treatment of cryptography, and is a useful reference for software implementation (which we do not address in the class).

• B. Schneier: Applied Cryptography.

Material available on-line on (computational) number theory and its cryptographic applications:

Some excellent references for computational number theory and applied algebra include:

• D. Angluin: Lecture Notes on the Complexity of Some Problems in Number Theory. Available for download from Tal Malkin's website at Columbia: (ps | pdf).  This is a short review of number theory and its computational aspects.  It is sufficient for the needs of our class.
• V. Shoup:  A Computational Introduction to Number Theory and Algebra. This is a very comprehensive introduction to algorithmic number theory, with all the necessary mathematical  background self-contained.  This is a BETA version, but in good shape.
  

Background Readings on Computability/Complexity 

Background reading on discrete math, probability, algorithms and complexity theory can be found in several of the above references (in particular the one by Shoup, by Menezes, van Oorschot, and Vanstone, and by Wenbo Mao.  The following two books are excellent stand-alone textbooks for, respectively, complexity and algorithms:

• M. Sipser: Introduction to the Theory of Computation. See chapter 0 for basic discrete math, and chapter 7 for basic complexity notions.
• T. H. Cormen, C. E. Leiserson, R. L, Rivest, C. Stein: Introduction to Algorithms. See first part for introduction to algorithms and randomized algorithms, and appendix for discrete math and probability overview.

Non-Technical Reading on Cryptography

Some interesting non-technical books about the history of cryptology (which will not be addressed in this class), include the following two, originally written in 1967 and 1999, respectively.

• D. Kahn:  The Codebreakers -- The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet. 
• S. Singh:  The Code Book -- The Secret History of Codes and Code Breaking.
  

Last modified: 01 Dec 2003