Books
- Bruce Schneier: Applied Cryptography, second edition, John Wiley & Sons, 1996. An excellent, practically oriented presentation of cryptographic algorithms, protocols, and methods. Definitely recommended reading. The homepage contains a table of contents, errata and other information.
- Douglas Stinson: Cryptography: Theory and Practice, CRC Press, second edition, 1996. An excellent, self-contained introduction to cryptography. Used widely as lecture material for university undergraduates. Has been translated to several languages. [homepage]
- Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot, and Scott A. Vanstone: Handbook of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, 1996. An excellent reference book on cryptography. It is more mathematical than for example, Schneier's book. Contains pseudo-code descriptions of a large number of algorithms and cryptosystems, as well as free samples of all the chapters of the book. [homepage]
- Neil Koblitz: A Course in Number Theory and Cryptography, second edition, Springer, 1994. An introduction to cryptography through number theory. Very thorough in explaining the number theoretic basis of algorithms needed in cryptography and in particular public key cryptosystems. Gives also a chapter on elliptic curves, which is in fact one of the best introductions to the topic.
- Eli Biham, Adi Shamir: Differential Cryptanalysis of the Data Encryption Standard, Springer-Verlag, 1993. A comprehensible account of the ground breaking differential cryptanalysis method. The authors explain the differential attack on DES in several stages of increasing complexity. The book also describes differential attacks against several other ciphers and hash functions.
- Charlie Kaufman, Radia Perlman, and Mike Speciner: Network Security - PRIVATE Communication in a PUBLIC World, Prentice-Hall, 1995. Covers areas of cryptography with practical relevance in an understandable way.
- Jennifer Seberry and Josed Pieprzyk: Cryptography: An Introduction to Computer Security, Prentice-Hall, 1989. Somewhat more theoretically oriented than the above.
- Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen: The Design of Rijndael, AES - The Advanced Encryption Standard, Springer, 2002. The authoritative guide to the Rijndael cipher, which was chosen to be the AES standard in 2000. This is a well written book by the designers of Rijndael. It contains the mathematical preliminaries, the detailed description of the algorithm, design principles, implementation and optimization issues, and a security analysis, with an introduction to the basics of differential and linear cryptanalysis.
- Rudolf Lidl and Harold Niederreiter: Introduction to Finite Fields and Their Applications, Revised Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1994. A comprehensive introduction to the mathematical theory of finite fields and some of its most important applications including cryptology.
- Alfred J. Menezes: Elliptic curve public key cryptosystems, Kluwer academic publishers, 1993. This book is now somewhat dated, but is still a good introduction text to elliptic curve cryptosystems.
- Ian Blake, Gadien Seroussi, and Nigel Smart: Elliptic Curves in Cryptography, Cambridge University Press, 1999. Almost up-to-date book about the cryptographical use of elliptic curves. Contains a complete explanation of the Schoof-Elkies-Atkin algorithm for point counting. Most of the book can be followed with very little background in algebra.
- Scott A. Vanstone, Darrell R. Hankerson, and Alfred J. Menezes: Guide to Elliptic Curve Cryptography, Springer, 2004.
- Advances In Elliptic Curve Cryptography, Ian Blake, Nigel Smart, and Gadien Seroussi eds., Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Electronic Frontier Foundation: Cracking DES, 1998. This book describes the breaking of DES by exhaustive search on a real special purpose machine. Contains full design details and some hardware analysis for cryptanalytical attacks.
- Man Young Rhee: Cryptography and Secure Data Communications, McGraw-Hill, 1994. This book is oriented towards the hardware aspects of cryptography. Contains thorough explanations about cryptosystems such as DES and RSA.
- Hans Riesel: Prime Numbers and Computer Methods for Factorization, Birkhauser, 1994. Concentrates on prime numbers and factoring large integers, and discusses their application to RSA and other public key methods.
- Xuejia Lai: On the Design and Security of Block Ciphers, ETH Series in Information Processing, vol. 1, Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Konstanz, Switzerland, 1992. This book contains the description and analysis of the IDEA cipher. It explains Lai's idea of mixing incompatible algebraic operations together and gives the theoretical basis for such constructions. Further, the book contains material about the differential cryptanalysis of IDEA and why IDEA should be resistant to it. Contains also an implementation of IDEA in C language.
- Donald Davies and Wyn Price: Security for Computer Networks, John Wiley, 1989. The first edition appeared in 1984, its material on standards and protocols is now fairly dated, but the main sections about DES (including modes, triple DES etc.) and public key cryptography are often very much appreciated by those who are neither mathematicians nor C wizards, but still want to understand what is going on in the algorithms.
- Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science Volume A: Algorithms and Complexity, J. van Leeuwen ed., Elsevier, 1994. This is a very large collection of survey articles. There is an article by Ron Rivest on cryptography, also an article by Arjen Lenstra and Hendrik Lenstra on algorithms in number theory. All articles have extensive references.
- Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook, Mikhail J. Atallah ed., CRC Press, 1999. A collection of survey papers. Contains many papers on cryptography: mathematical background, basic algorithms, pseudo-random sequences, cryptanalysis and electronic cash.
- David Kahn: Seizing the Enigma, Arrow Books, 1996. This is a thorough book by David Kahn, the author of The Codebreakers and a well-known historian of cryptography. This book gives an almost complete picture of the Enigma story from the early years to its use in World War II. Highly interesting (to a cryptographer) is the description of the early analysis by Poles (basically by Rejewski) and the later developments in Bletchley Park.
- Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, F.H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp eds., Oxford University Press, 1993. This book is a series of recollections by a variety of people that worked in Bletchley Park during World War II. It contains several articles about the actual cryptosystems such as versions of Enigma, Fish, and some codes. Some articles are event based and others very personal. Overall a very good book about Bletchley Park during World War II.
- Simon Singh: Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, Anchor Books, 2000. Includes a history of how cryptography has affected the world, from the World Wars to the death of Mary, Queen of Scots. Also takes a look at the future of cryptography.
