Network Security

The classic guide to cryptography and network security – now fully updated!

“Alice and Bob are back!”

Widely regarded as the most comprehensive yet comprehensible guide to network security and cryptography, the previous editions of Network Security received critical acclaim for lucid and witty explanations of the inner workings of cryptography and network security protocols. In this edition, the authors have significantly updated and revised the previous content, and added new topics that have become important.

This book explains sophisticated concepts in a friendly and intuitive manner. For protocol standards, it explains the various constraints and committee decisions that led to the current designs. For cryptographic algorithms, it explains the intuition behind the designs, as well as the types of attacks the algorithms are designed to avoid. It explains implementation techniques that can cause vulnerabilities even if the cryptography itself is sound. Homework problems deepen your understanding of concepts and technologies, and an updated glossary demystifies the field’s jargon. Network Security, Third Edition will appeal to a wide range of professionals, from those who design and evaluate security systems to system administrators and programmers who want a better understanding of this important field. It can also be used as a textbook at the graduate or advanced undergraduate level.

Coverage includes

• Network security protocol and cryptography basics
• Design considerations and techniques for secret key and hash algorithms (AES, DES, SHA-1, SHA-2, SHA-3)
• First-generation public key algorithms (RSA, Diffie-Hellman, ECC)
• How quantum computers work, and why they threaten the first-generation public key algorithms
• Multi-factor authentication of people
• Real-time communication (SSL/TLS, SSH, IPsec) 
• New applications (electronic money, blockchains)
• New cryptographic techniques (homomorphic encryption, secure multiparty computation)

Charlie Kaufman is currently Security Architect for Dell Storage Systems. Previously, he was the Security Architect for Microsoft Azure and before that for Lotus Notes. He has contributed to a number of IETF standards efforts including IPsec, S/MIME, and DNSSEC and served as a member of the Internet Architecture Board. He served on the National Academy of Sciences expert panel that wrote the book Trust In Cyberspace.

Radia Perlman is currently a Fellow at Dell Technologies. She is known for her contributions to bridging (spanning tree algorithm), routing (link state routing), and security (distributed systems robust despite malicious participants). She’s the author of Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocol. She’s been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the Internet Hall of Fame, and awarded lifetime achievement awards from Usenix and ACM’s SIGCOMM. She has a PhD in computer science from MIT.

Mike Speciner is an MIT-trained technologist with expertise in mathematics, physics, and computer science. He currently serves as CTO and cofounder of The Singing Torah. His hobby is writing software for educational purposes in various common and obscure programming languages. 

Ray Perlner is a Mathematician in the Cryptographic Technology Group of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He has over a dozen research papers focusing primarily on post-quantum cryptography. He has degrees in both physics and mathematics from MIT.