Cryptography

Preface

For millennia, human beings have used multiple forms of codes to protect their oral communications, entries of castles, their messages, and other belongings. Indeed, cryptography existed early in human history and civilizations, before the event of computers. Cryptography has been developed and improved over the centuries, in particular for protecting military secrets and spying on enemies, then for protecting industrial and economical secrets, then for protecting recent applications made possible with the use of the internet, and ultimately for protecting the privacy of electronic devices’ users. In a highly computerized world, cryptography is the pillar of security. Encrypting and signing are the most performed cryptographic operations in the digital world.

Cryptography provides services to secure websites, electronic transmissions, and data repositories. For more than three decades, public-key cryptography has been enabling people, who never met before, to securely communicate and trust each other. Cryptography is not only used over the internet, but also in phones, bank cards, televisions, cars, aircrafts, door locks, implants, and a variety of other devices. Without cryptography, hackers could get into victims’ emails, listen to their phone conversations, tap into their cable companies and acquire free cable services, or break into their bank accounts.

Cryptography is the discipline at the intersection of computer science and mathematics. It provides algorithms ...