Contemporary Cryptology: the Science of Information Integrity.

Cryptology is the study of secret codes. But it is more than just hiding secrets, and it is applicable to far more than just military and diplomatic circles. This collection of survey articles provides a rich perspective of the uses of cryptography for: privacy, authentication, digital signatures, identification, authorization, certification, witnessing, liability, time of occurrence, voting, and many more.

This is a lively collection, written by authors prominent in the open research in crytography, among them Whitfield Diffie, Gustavus Simmons, Ernest Brickell, James Massey, Andrew Odlyzko, and Judy Moore. The best of its chapters are instructive, informative, fascinating, and provide valuable reference work. The lesser chapters are sometimes written for a limited audience or are careless with notation. On the whole, it is an outstanding book.

The book grew out of an issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE that was devoted to cryptography (Volume 76, No. 5, May 1988). Most articles have been expanded and updated in the transition from the Proceedings to the present book; we find mention of research from 1990-1991 in factoring and differential cryptanalysis. A second printing corrected errata and updated some text, and a planned third printing will continue to improve.

Each chapter has its own complete bibliography, and there is an extensive index for the entire book.

Because the chapters are written by different authors, there is some overlap in the …