Codes, Ciphers, and Secret Messages

Summer 1998

Last update of this page: Fri Jun 26, 12:30pm

• Instructor: Tim Hsu
• Office: 3075 East Hall
• Phone: 763-5048

Announcements:

• None at the moment.

Course materials:

• Edgar Allen Poe's story The Gold Bug
• Lights Out (thanks to Dapeng Zhu, a former Math 513 student of mine)

Companies and other organizations that do cryptography:

• Counterpane Systems
  • Interesting essays on why cryptography is hard and how cryptography can be done badly
  • Cracking cell-phone encryption
  • Cracking Microsoft's Windows NT private network security
  • Blowfish and Twofish encryption algorithms
• Cryptography Research
  • Defeating electronic cash card security
  • The timing attack on public-key cryptosystems
  • An excellent on-line guide to finding out more about cryptography
• Hi/fn hardware data compression and encryption
• The ISAAC internet security group at UC Berkeley
  • Cell-phone cloning
• The National Security Agency
  • The National Cryptologic Museum
• Pretty Good Privacy (now part of Network Associates, Inc.)
  • A description of what PGP does
• RSA, Inc.
  • Frequently asked questions, featuring a short encyclopedia of encryption techniques
• SSL 3.0, the cryptography protocol used by, for instance, Netscape products and Microsoft Internet Explorer

Other cryptography-related Web sites:

• Thanks to Jeff Doozan for:
  • Password recovery for lots of commonly used software. Lots of interesting info about encryption algorithms used in commercial software.
  • Tom Dunigan's list of zillions of cryptography links
  • The American Cryptogram Association
• A math encyclopedia page on the Josephus problem (thanks to Betsy Huebner, Joel Prusi, and Susan Reading)
• The number field sieve factoring algorithm: new results