Some Crypto Links for MAT 331

Cryptography related items

The chapter of my course notes devoted to doing cryptography in maple.
Some notes on cryptography written by Charles Blair of the University of Illinois (also available as Postscript or LaTex).
Learning About Cryptography, by Terry Ritter of Ritter Software Engineering. He also provides a good list of cryptography-related books. Some I particularly like are A Course in Number Theory and Cryptography (Graduate Texts in Mathematics, No 114) by Neal I. Koblitz. (Hardcover, 235 pages, Springer Verlag, 1994) The Codebreakers; The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet, by David Kahn. (Hardcover, 1181 pages, 1996, basically a reprint of the 1967 classic.) Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, 2nd edition, by Bruce Schneier. (Paper, 784 pages, John Wiley & Sons, 1995) Handbook of Applied Cryptography, by Alfred Menezes, Paul van Oorschot, and Scott Vanstone (816 pages, CRC press, 1996). You can read chapters from this online in PostScript or PDF format.
The Cryptography FAQ has all sorts of good stuff in it. RSA Labs has a reasonable, if somewhat self-serving, list of Frequently Asked Questions about Cryptography, as well. John Savard has put together a Cryptographic Compendium, which discusses of a number of cryptographic systems. He also has a nice collection of cryptography links.
There are a large number of links to cryptography related sites on the Quadralay Cryptography Archive. Also, the InternationalCryptography Pages has both links and brief descriptions of currently used cryptographic algorithms.
Another good page with a lot of cryptography and network security information is provided by ShoreTel Communications.
Information about steganography and watermarking can be found at StegoArchive.com
The May 2002 issue of Discover magazine has an article on Quantum Cryptography, which is just on the horizon of usability.
A look at Cryptology in the 16th and 17th Centuries by Thomas Penn Leary, is an interesting read. Oddly, the page says that the article is from volume XX number 3 (July 1996) of Cryptologia, (a quarterly journal devoted to Cryptology), but the online pages for the journal say the first edition was in from January 1997. Still worth reading, though.
Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Gold Bug"(1853) is one of the earliest short stories to have cryptography play a prominent role in the plot. Its certainly worth reading, if you never have.
An excellent novel in which cryptography plays a role is Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon(1999). Of course, while crytography is an important part of the plot, there's lots more there: computer hackers, World War II, buried treasure, General Douglas MacArthur, haiku, Alan Turing, love affairs, the Riemann Zeta function, ... The solitaire encryption algorithm was designed by Bruce Schneier (creator of the Blowfish encryption algorithm) for use in this book, and is a quite good cryptosystem using a deck of cards.