"An Introduction to Cryptography"

The book "An Introduction to Cryptography" appeared at first as a part of product manuals PGP 6.0 for PGP software system in 1998. This book served for the purpose of allowing readers from all background to understand the basics of Cryptography. As other technical books that dedicated to this subject is generally catered for programmers, scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.

Cryptography is one of the important elements for information technology. To use cryptography, firstly, we start from an ordinary data called plaintext and transform it to ciphertext. Cipher is the process for the transformation from plaintext to ciphertext and then back to plaintext again. The process of turning plaintext into ciphertext is called encrypting, while turning ciphertext back to plaintext is called decrypting.

This book outlined the basic components of cryptography, such as participants and variables, random numbers, keys and ciphers. It also indicated the future of cryptography in the aspect of privacy-enhancing technologies, rise of hardware, digital signatures and semantics.

Excerpt from An Introduction to Cryptography

Read the full book at http://cisweb.bristolcc.edu/~ik/Download/CIT18/IntroToCrypto.pdf