Re: Books on cryptography

[Jim Gillogly <jim@rand.org>]

> I have available to me an almost complete set of books on Cryptography
> from the Aegean Park Press. The question is, are these books worth
> reading (there are a whole bunch of them) ? If only particular ones are

Yes, a lot of them are worth reading, if you want the info in them.  I
especially like the Callimahos & Friedman books on Military
Cryptanalytics.  They're the training manuals for NSA as of about the
1950s -- four volumes: Ia, Ib, IIa, and IIb, or something like that.
An FOIA has picked up bits of volume III from the mid-70's, but it's
not complete and hasn't been published.  If you want to learn to do
traffic analysis and cryptanalysis, work through the Zendian problem...
and allow a season.  The British Special Intelligence handbook has
some great stuff on stripping off superencipherments.

Also especially lovely is the Riverbank Publications series, also by
Friedman.  His work on the Index of Coincidence is absolutely wondrous
for deciding when you've got plaintext and for finding periods of
periodic ciphers.

If you're looking for modern cryptology, though, Aegean doesn't have much
of relevance.  For that you need conference proceedings, like Crypto '93
(just out), Eurocrypt, Asiacrypt, and so on.

	Jim Gillogly
	Mersday, 20 Astron S.R. 1994, 19:41