Introduction

Wow, this book came out three years ago!

While officially this is an "oldie", you know what? Very little is out of date (minus some brutal cut-n-paste errors for the source code).

1 Bits and Bytes A complete overview of the Java numeric model. Excellent if you are porting code from C to Java, or if you are working with binary data.

2 Secret Key Cryptography An overview of hashes and ciphers. Not much practically has changed in the last few years

3 Public Key Crytography A great introduction to PKC involving system based on primes and elliptic curves. Again, all the data in here is solid.

4 Random Numbers Who knew random numbers were so interesting? Fortunately random numbers in 2002 are still random numbers in 2005

5 Java Cryptography A good introduction to the JCE. I wrote this just as Java 1.4 came out. Now we have Java 1.5 and no significant changes occured

6 Small Message Encoding and Encryption The information in this chapter is still not published anywhere else.

7 Application and Data Architecture This chapter was written at the close of the deadline and is a little thin. But not so thin that if certain Fortune 500 companies had read it, they could have prevented a few million credit cards from being lost.

A Java Cryptography Class Reference Organized alphabetically, not by package, so you can actually use it

R Reference Real references that point to real standards and research papers.

CIDA at amazon

In other words you should buy it today. And look! There on the left. It's a handy link to amazon! Wow, it's cheap too. Sigh.

--nickg

NYC, June 2005