Codes and Cryptography

EBook Description: This text unifies the concepts of information, codes and cryptography as first studied by Shannon in his seminal papers on communication and secrecy systems. The first five chapters cover the fundamental ideas of information theory, compact encoding of messages and the theory of error-correcting codes. After a discussion of mathematical models of English, there is an introduction to the classical Shannon model of cryptography. This is followed by a brief survey of those aspects of computational complexity needed for an understanding of modern cryptographic methods and the recent advances in public key cryptography, password systems and authentication techniques. Because the aim of the text is to make this exciting branch of modern applied mathematics available to readers with a variety of interests and backgrounds, the mathematical prerequisites have been kept to an absolute minimum. Problems and solutions are include

This book originated in a well-established yet constantly evolving course on Complexity and Cryptography which we have both given to final year Mathematics undergraduates at Oxford for many years. It has also formed part of an M.Sc. course on Mathematics and the Foundations of Computer Science, and has been the basis for a more recent course on Randomness and Complexity for the same groups of students.

One of the main motivations for setting up the course was to give mathematicians, who traditionally meet little in the way of algorithms, a taste for the beauty and importance of the subject. Early on in the book the reader will have
gained sufficient background to understand what is now regarded as one of the top ten major open questions of this century, namely the P = NP question. At the same time the student is exposed to the mathematics underlying the security
of cryptosystems which are now an integral part of the modern �email age�. Although this book provides an introduction to many of the key topics in complexity theory and cryptography, we have not attempted to write a comprehensive text. Obvious omissions include cryptanalysis, elliptic curve cryptography, quantum cryptography and quantum computing. These omissions have allowed us to keep the mathematical prerequisites to a minimum. Throughout the text the emphasis is on explaining the main ideas and proving the mathematical results rigorously. Thus we have not given every result in complete generality.

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