A course in mathematical cryptography (Q2263382)

The book offers a survey of the main cryptosystems and protocols in Public Key Cryptography, paying special attention to the underlying mathematical tools. The book ``rew out of many courses presented by the authors over the past twenty years at various universities'' and ``could be a suitable text for first and second year master level courses''. The book is structured in 15 chapters which, according to the Preface, could be divided in four parts. The first one (Chapters 1 to 4) collects the basic concepts on Cryptography and Computational Complexity and a summary on Symmetric Cryptography. Part 2 summarizes the number theoretic results and algorithms used in Public Key Cryptography (Chapters 5 and 6) and then Chapter 7 shows their application to the classical cryptosystems based on factorization (RSA) and the discrete logarithm problem (Diffie-Hellman, ElGamal), while Chapter 8 is devoted to Elliptic Curve Cryptography. The third part (Chapters 9 to 12) deals with a topic usually absent in similar books: the cryptography based on (non-commutative) groups, paying particular attention to the cryptography based on Braid Groups. Finally Part 4 gathers two further topics: the cryptographic methods based on Gröbner Basis both in commutative (Chapter 13) and non-commutative (Chapter 14) polynomial rings and the Lattice-based methods (Chapter 15). The book tries to be as self-contained as possible. The mathematics necessary for the understanding of the treated topics are previously exposed. Many theorems are not proved but, in these cases, a reference to the Bibliography is always provided. Many examples are included through the tex and some exercises are proposed at the end of each chapter.