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2010 SP Buchmann Introduction To Cryptography

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97 views2 pages

2010 SP Buchmann Introduction To Cryptography

Uploaded by

luka.g.gorgadze
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Review of the book

”Introduction to Cryptography (Second Edition)”


by Johannes Buchmann
Springer, 2004
ISBN: 0-387-21156-X

by
Mohamed Saied Emam Mohamed
Technical University of Darmstadt (TUD), Germany

1 What the book is about


As the title states the book by Johannes Buchmann provides an introduction to cryptog-
raphy. Buchmann’s text in only 324 pages (excluding the appendices) presents a stand
alone introduction to some modern cryptographic methods.
The book begins with the mathematical background that will be used as foundation for
the cryptographic methods discussed in this book. Chapter one explains the important
properties of integers and the extended Euclidean algorithm. Chapter two includes some
important algebraic definitions (groups, residue class, ring, fields,...). Also, it contains
algorithms for fast evaluation of power products and the Chinese remainder theorem.
Probability theory and Shannon’s view of perfect secrecy are presented in chapter 4.
There are three chapters discussing symmetric cryptography and to be more specific
they are devoted to block ciphers. Chapter 3 explains the meaning of cryptosystems and
gives some different encryption schemes. For the symmetric cryptography the author just
defines the structure of stream ciphers and provides two examples, whereas he explains
the block cipher in more details. Moreover chapter 5 and chapter 6 represent a complete
study to the most famous block ciphers DES and AES, respectively.
In the next four chapters, the author discusses asymmetric cryptography (public key
cryptography). Since many public key cryptosystems use large prime numbers, the author
gives more additional mathematical preliminaries for the prime number generation and
some algorithms used for testing the primality of large numbers in chapter 7. The idea
of public key cryptosystems and a description to the most important schemes are given
in chapter 8, for examples RSA and ElGamal. The security of RSA is based on the
difficulty of the factorization problem and is studied in chapter 9. It is focusing on the
quadratic sieve algorithm and providing an estimation to the efficiency of it and some
other factoring algorithms. Similarly, in chapter 10 the security analysis of ElGamal
cryptosystem is discussed by analyzing the algorithms that solve the discrete logarithm
problem.

1
In the next part of this text, cryptographic hash functions and digital signatures are
discussed. Chapter 11 explains the structure of hash functions and their application in
cryptography. It gives SHA-1 as an example. The idea of digital signature and its security
are found in chapter 12. The author uses RSA, ElGamal, and DSA as examples to digital
signature schemes. Simply he describes the key generation, the signature generation, and
the verification of each example. He studies the efficiency and some attack scenarios for
each one of them. Also he presents an example of a special purpose digital signature, so-
called blind signatures. Two different protocols are given (Chaum and Okamoto-Schnorr).
In the last part of this book, the author briefly introduces some other topics. In less than
three pages he defines the elliptic curves. Identification, secret charing, and public key
infrastructure are just explained in a very brief way.

2 Summary
I like the structure of this book. It gives a general mathematical background in the
beginning and particular mathematical preliminaries just at the time you need them to
understand some specific cryptographic method. It provides a clearly detailed presen-
tation of some selected methods in cryptography. The focus of this book is on number
theoretic algorithms that are used in cryptography like primality testing, factorization
and discrete logarithms. It also provides a detailed description of block ciphers as an
example of symmetric cryptography. Explanations of some basic particular cryptography
such as digital signatures, hash functions, secret sharing, and certificate authentications
are provided. The brief description of some important methods in cryptography repre-
sents one of the drawbacks of this book, for example the part that is dealing with elliptic
curve. Also the definitions of O-notation and Ω-notation are not clear.

3 Recommendation
As the author mentioned this book is based on courses in cryptography that have been
taught by the author himself at the Technical University of Darmstadt. So I would rec-
ommend this text for undergraduate students or readers who want to get an overview
of some modern cryptographic methods and their mathematical preliminaries, like for
example RSA and DES. The text is just 324 pages, so it is focusing on some crypto-
graphic methods like number theoretical cryptographic techniques and just touches some
other methods like elliptic curves. For readers that need texts with more wide details in
cryptography, I recommend these books:

• Oded Goldreich “Foundations of Cryptography: Volume 1 and 2”

• Doug Stinson “Cryptography: theory and practice”

• Wenbo Mao “Modern cryptography: theory and practice”

The reviewer is a Ph.D. student at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

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