Introduction
This page contains pointers to some reference material for the
2006 Information Technology
Enhancement Program for gifted students course
Decrypting Historical
Ciphers. Program leaders are Professors Cunsheng Ding and Mordecai Golin
Class Handouts
- April 1, 2006: Introduction & History
- May 6, 2006: Room 3301 9:30-12:30
Part 1 of the lecture is an intro to ciphers; part 2 describes the RSA
algorithm
- Introduction to Ciphers (Postscript)
(PDF)
- An Introduction to RSA (PostScript)
- Public Key Cryptography (from Kurose & Ross, 3rd ed) (PPT)
(PDF)
- Frequency table for English letters, digraphs and trigraphs (PS)
(PDF)
(from Lewand 2000)
- May 27, 2006: Room 4480 9:30-12:30
- More monoalphabetic ciphers (PPT)
(PDF)
- An introduction to polyalphabetic ciphers (Postscript)
(PDF)
For more on how to break Vigenere ciphers see, e.g., Lewand or Spillman (Spillman's
CAP web page: for Vigenere ciphere see notes on part 2)
- June 24, 2006: Room 3301 9:30-12:30
- Breaking Classical Ciphers (PPT)
Useful Links
Bibliographic Material
None of these books are "required" for the course but
some of them might
be
quoted in the lectures.
- Ronald L. Graham, Donald E. Knuth & Oren Patashnik
Concrete
Mathematics (2nd ed)
Addison-Wesley, 1994
Good
introduction to the basic number theory used in
cryptography
- James F. Kurose & Keith W. Ross
Computer Networking (3rd
ed)
Addison-Wesley, 2005
Has a nice description of
how public-key cryptography is used for computer-network
security
- Robert Edward Lewand
Cryptological Mathematics
The
Mathematical Association of America, 2000
A lot of our
"introduction to cipher" material came from this book
- Simon Singh
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt
to Quantum Cryptography
Anchor Press, 2000
A good
popular history of coding theory
- Richard J. Spillman
Classical and Contemporary
Cryptology
Pearson Prentice Hall 2005
Comes with
very good cipher-breaking code
Last updated 05/19/2006
by Mordecai Golin
In case of
questions please send email to golin@cs.ust.hk