Texts and References

Textbooks

1. REQUIRED (available at Columbia's book store). This book will be used primarily in the first half of the course
   • Title: Cryptography Theory & Practice
   • Author: Stinson, Douglas R.
   • Publisher: Chapman Hall/CRC
   • Edition: 2nd
   • ISBN: 1-58488-206-9
2. RECOMMENDED You don't have to get this, but it's a fun read. It may also help flesh out your understanding of some topics especially during the first two or three weeks.
   • Title: The Code Book
   • Author: Singh, Simon
   • Publisher: Anchor Books
   • Edition: 2000
   • ISBN: 0385495323

Online resources

• REQUIRED during the second half of the course: Prof. Malkin's lecture notes
• Additional on-line texts
  • S. Goldwasser and M. Bellare's Lecture Notes on Cryptography. A theoretically solid graduate reference.
  • M. Bellare and P. Rogaway's Lecture Notes. Solid graduate level with more applications.
  • A.J. Menezes, P.C. van Oorschot, and S.A. Vanstone's Handbook of Applied Cryptography. The copyright statement allows you to download one copy for your personal use. The chapter on number theory contains all the number theory facts that we'll use in the course.
  • D. Angluin's Number theory notes. Succinct but thorough introduction to computational number theory.
  • V. Shoup's A Computational Introduction to Number Theory and Algebra. Excellent and extensive treatment of all the higher math we could ever run into in the course, plus a lot more.

There are no books available (that I could find) that satisfy the various requirements for this course. However, Stinson's book treats well the subject matter that it covers. We will need to go beyond the text both in the areas covered and in the depth of some topics. Stinson's book is a good place to begin and when the book falls short, we'll switch over to parts of Malkin's note.

Singh's book is just a fun read.