Reviewed by Dr. Herbert Voss
Due to the long history of cryptography, one can assume that that there are already numerous publications on this topic and are also cheaper than this book with its 640 pages. Bernhard Esslinger’s main aim with this publication is to take the practical application into account. So he shows in a lot of places how the theory of each cryptographic procedure can be checked with the two open source programs CrypTool and SageMath to better understand the theory behind the “scene”. Through this interplay of theory and practice the not really trivial mathematical background can be made much easier to understand. However, the book is not a simple introduction in the use of CrypTool, even if there is a short contents of the CrypTool menus in the appendix.
The first known cryptographic methods have nowadays no more a theoretical or practical meaning. Nevertheless, for the sake of completeness, there is one chapter with the history of cryptography with the associated mathematical background. The main focus in the book, of course, is the theory of the up-to-date cryptography procedures. The security of the individual procedures is also discussed in detail. It is well known, that so-called “cyber attacks” play a role these days just as big, if not even bigger, as the encryption itself.
The important theory of prime numbers is discussed in its own chapter with almost 50 pages covered, with many examples given for SageMath. Each chapter contains bibliographic information at the end, which contain links to further information. What is very helpful is that the chapters, partly written by other authors, can be read independently of each other. It is evident, that mathematical knowledge is necessary for a book on cryptography.
The conclusion remains that purchasing the book despite the relatively high price worthwhile; it helps to understand how information is encrypted and can be decrypted.
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