Taking the mystery out of learning cryptography

Cryptography Decrypted thanks 

Reviewers and Readers

Our reviewers and readers helped us create a more accurate primer of computer cryptography.  Here we've listed reviewers who helped before publication and readers who found some errors after publication.  

We were fortunate to have excellent reviewers whose expertise in their field surpassed ours. Very little, if anything, made it past their scrupulous eyes. We're very much indebted to each of them for their contributions which improved the clarity and accuracy of Cryptography Decrypted.. The following folks graciously reviewed more than one version of the manuscript.

Greg Rose

We were especially fortunate to have Greg Rose give thoughtful and nurturing advice from the book proposal through the final review. More than a few chapters were rewritten over and over and over again to clarify cryptographic points Greg made.

Greg, from Qualcomm, Australia, designed and developed his own secret key cipher. More thoughtful (and amusing) information can be found on his home page: http://people.qualcomm.com/ggr/

Paul Brown

Paul Brown is the former director of the Center for Advanced Engineering Studies – Advanced Studies Program at MIT where he was graduate advisor to HX. Twice, he did a comprehensive review of manuscripts-in-progress; We're grateful for his attention to detail and wonderful dry humor which kept us on our toes and smiling.

Marcus Leech

Marcus Leech, at Nortel (formerly Bell-Northern Research Ltd.), gave us insight into the difficulties writing an introductory text, especially one as complex as cryptography. In particular, although repetition is useful for emphasis, Marcus showed us places where repetition belabored the reader. In addition, Marcus, himself the author of many papers, directed us to additional cryptographic resources, in particular, Steve Bellowin’s paper on the cut-and-paste attack.

Doug Hughes

Doug Hughes, formerly at Auburn University, provided the insight of an academic and  professional systems engineer and helped improve the clarity of the Cryptography Decrypted. For example, although Doug never expressly asked for it, his suggestions helped create the sub-title of Chapter 11 – ‘A Lesson in Inverses’ and introduce a complex topic like message digests with a simplifying airport analogy.

http://www.eng.auburn.edu/users/doug/homepage.html

Anton Stiglic

Anton Stiglic, a member of the security team at Zero Knowledge Systems,
convinced us to clarify more than one cryptographic concept. For
instance, the difference between signing and private key encryption (see
Chapter 12 Signing Terminology). In one case, because of time
constraints, we removed a description of complexity theory; hopefully
Anton will review our next iteration. 

http://crypto.cs.mcgill.ca/~stiglic

Oops Discovered After Publication

February 2001: 
Page 110, Chapter 11, Figure 11-19:  18 should be 11

July 2001:
Caption to Fig 11-21, "23*23" should be "23*22"
(found by H. Kaikow)

Page 110, Paragraph beginning with, "Now Alice openly . . ."
"A, B, and C" should be "A, B, and F" 
(found by: M.B. Hackmann)
  

September 2003
page 302 the Diffie-Hellman. X1 should be 8.
(found by andreas.weiss@alum.rpi.edu )