MTH6115 Course Material
MTH6115 |
Cryptography |
| Course Material |
Spring 2009 |
Course descriptions and course information
Acknowledgement
This web-page and
the notes
etc. for the module closely follow Peter Cameron's originals which he
has very
kindly allowed me to use. His pages may still be accessible here.
The first ELEVEN instalments of the notes were
slightly revised by Rob Wilson when he taught the module in 2008.
Notes
- Notes
1:
Introduction
- Notes
2:
Substitution ciphers
- Notes
3:
Stream ciphers
- Notes
4:
Stream ciphers, continued
- Notes
5:
Stream ciphers, concluded
- Notes
6:
Public-key cryptography
- Notes
7:
Public-key cryptography: RSA
- Notes
8:
Public-key cryptography: Primes and factorisation
- Notes
9:
Public-key cryptography: El-Gamal
- Notes
10:
Public-key cryptography: Other ciphers
- Notes
11:
Secret sharing and other matters
- Notes
12:
Quantum effects; bibliography
Coursework
Other course material
The recommended book for reading before taking the course is Simon
Singh's
The Code Book; the recommended course text is Douglas Stinson's
Cryptography: theory and practice (unfortunately, Paul Garrett's
Making, Breaking Codes is out of print). (See below for
bibliographical
details.)
Web Resources
- Here is
the list of ASCII 7-bit codes, and here are
the
International Telegraph Codes.
- Here
are
three samples of random text matching the letter, digram and trigram
frequencies in a piece of English text (Lewis Carrol's Alice's
Adventures
in Wonderland).
- Here is
"FISH and I" by W. T. Tutte (one of the Bletchley Park codebreakers).
- Here is the
Trinity
College Historical Cryptography website.
- Here is
a collection
of Maple lessons on topics in cryptography from Adept Scientific,
which can be
downloaded free of charge.
- Here are
some lecture notes by Peter Cameron on computational complexity.
- Here
are John Preskill's Caltech notes on quantum computing.
- H
ere
is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"
- Here
is Edgar
Allan Poe's "The Gold-Bug" .
Further reading
- General:
- Henry Beker and Fred Piper, Cipher Systems: The Protection of
Communications, Northwood Books, London, 1982.
- Robert Churchhouse, Codes and Ciphers: Julius Caesar, the
Enigma, and
the Internet, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.
- Paul Garrett, Making, Breaking Codes: An Introduction to
Cryptology, Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, 2001.
- Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and
Code-Breaking, Fourth Estate, London, 1999.
- Douglas R. Stinson, Cryptography: Theory and Practice
(2nd
edition), Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, 2002.
- John Talbot and Dominic Welsh, Complexity and cryptography:
An
introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006.
- Dominic Welsh, Codes and Cryptography, Oxford University
Press,
Oxford, 1988.
- Susan Loepp and William K. Wootters, Protecting information:
from
classical error correction to quantum cryptography, Cambridge
University
Press, 2006.
- Historical:
- Helen FouchC3=A9 Gaines, Cryptanalysis: A Study of Ciphers
and their
Solution, Dover Publ. (reprint), New York, 1956.
- F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp (eds.), Code Breakers: The
Inside Story
of Bletchley Park, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993.
- Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Vintage, London,
1992.
- Leo Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide: The Story of SOE's Code
War,
HarperCollins, London, 1998.
- Doron Swade, The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the
Quest to
Build the First Computer, Little, Brown & Co., London, 2000.
- Gordon Welchman, The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma
Codes, M
& M Baldwin, Cleobury Mortimer, 1998.
- Peter Wright, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a
Senior
Intelligence Officer, Stoddart Publ. Co., Toronto, 1987.
- Fictional:
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Dancing Men, in
The
Complete Sherlock Holmes, Penguin (reprint), London, 1981.
- Edgar Allan Poe, The Gold-Bug, in Complete Tales and
Poems,
Castle Books, Edison, NJ, 1985.
- Dorothy L. Sayers, Have His Carcase, Victor Gollancz,
London,
1932.
- Related topics:
- Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, BBC
publications,
London, 1965.
- M. R. Garey and D. S. Johnson, Computers and Intractability:
A Guide
to the Theory of NP-Completeness, Freeman, San Francisco, 1979.
- Ray Hill, A First Course in Coding Theory, Oxford
University
Press, Oxford, 1986.
- Michael A. Nielsen and Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Information
and
Quantum Computation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2000.
- Miscellaneous:
- G. Mander (ed.), wot txters hav bin w8ing 4, Michael
O'Mara
Books, London, 2000.
- Georges Perec (translated by Gilbert Adair), A Void,
Harvill
Press, 1994.
- Ernest Vincent Wright, Gadsby, Wetzel Publishing Co., Los
Angeles, 1931.