Terms and Conditions:

Oded Goldreich wrote:Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of the material posted here is currently granted without fee provided that copies are made only for personal or classroom use, are not distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

Book Excerpts:

Cryptography is concerned with the construction of schemes that withstand any abuse: Such schemes are constructed so to maintain a desired functionality, even under malicious attempts aimed at making them deviate from their prescribed functionality.

This book is aimed at presenting firm foundations for cryptography. The foundations of cryptography are the paradigms, approaches and techniques used to conceptualize, define and provide solutions to natural "security concerns". This book will present some of these paradigms, approaches and techniques as well as some of the fundamental results obtained using them. The emphasis is on the clarification of fundamental concepts and on demonstrating the feasibility of solving several central cryptographic problems.

This book focuses on several archetypical cryptographic problems (e.g., encryption and signature schemes) and on several central tools (e.g., computational difficulty, pseudorandomness, and zero-knowledge proofs). For each of these problems (resp., tools), this book starts by presenting the natural concern underlying it (resp., its intuitive objective), then define the problem (resp., tool), and finally demonstrate that the problem may be solved (resp., the tool can be constructed). In the latter step, the focus is on demonstrating the feasibility of solving the problem, not on providing a practical solution. As a secondary concern, this book typically discuss the level of practicality (or impracticality) of the given (or known) solution.

Intended Audience:

The book is aimed to serve both as a textbook and a reference text. That is, it is aimed at serving both the beginner and the expert. In order to achieve this aim, the presentation of the basic material is very detailed so to allow a typical CS-undergraduate to follow it. An advanced student (and certainly an expert) will find the pace (in these parts) way too slow. However, an attempt was made to allow the latter reader to easily skip details obvious to him/her. In particular, proofs are typically presented in a modular way.

Reviews:

Amazon.com

:) "The topics that Goldreich has chosen cover a lot of important areas, and he has done a great job of pulling out the best, most essential results to present."

:) "... for those taking academic interest in the field or trying to devise novel cryptographic schemes, this book is an effective way to get a solid grasp on the theory, and a delightful way to understand this exciting branch of computer science."