From email to the global system for mobile communications (GSM), from secure Web access to online administration and government applications, cryptography is an essential part of today’s information systems. Cryptography provides confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. It can prevent fraud in electronic payments and assure the validity of financial transactions. It can protect your anonymity or prove your identity. It prevents industrial competitors from reading your confidential documents. And, as commerce and communications continue to move onto computer networks, cryptography will become a more important scientific domain. Cryptography is primarily focused on research into the security analysis of different algorithms and protocols and the design of new ones, better adapted to new technologies and applications. Theoretical and practical advances in the fields of cryptography and coding are important in facilitating the growth of data communications and data networks of various types. This book contains selected refereed proceedings of the tenth Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications (IMA) international conference.

Covering all of the main aspects of the theory and applications of cryptography and coding, the book presents 26 revised papers, together with four invited contributions, reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The papers are organized in sections on coding theory, signatures and signcryption, symmetric cryptography, side channels, algebraic cryptanalysis, information-theoretic applications, number-theoretic foundations, and public key and ID-based encryption schemes.

The opening part of the book covers some very interesting ground. For example, the Maurer invited contribution, “Abstract Models of Computation in Cryptography,” stresses the important problem of computational security proofs in cryptography. Another important invited contribution is Koblitz and Menezes’ “Pairing-Based Cryptography at High Security Levels,” which examines the implications of heightened security needs for pairing-based cryptosystems, and discusses two families of elliptic curves for use in pairing-based cryptosystems.

The section on coding theory covers subjects like “Tessellation Based Multiple Description Coding,” and the hot problem of “Exploiting Coding Theory for Collision Attacks on SHA-1,” which shows how coding theory can be exploited efficiently for the cryptanalysis of hash functions.

The signatures and signcryption section of the book covers important topics like “Hash Based Digital Signature Schemes,” “Non-interactive Designated Verifier Proofs,” and “Undeniable Signatures.” It also contains a very interesting paper by Malone-Lee, “General Construction for Simultaneous Signing and Encrypting,” on a very efficient, general construction for the simultaneous signing and encrypting of data.

An interesting part of the book is about algebraic cryptanalysis. One paper in this section, “Probabilistic Algebraic Attacks,” investigates a probabilistic algebraic attack on linear feedback shift register (LFSR)-based stream ciphers.

In the section on public key and ID-based encryption schemes, two papers deserve special mention: Stam’s “A Key Encapsulation Mechanism for NTRU” and Barbosa and Farshim’s “Efficient Identity-Based Key Encapsulation to Multiple Parties,” which introduces the concept of identity-based key encapsulation to multiple parties, and defines a security model for it.

The book covers some important research areas in coding and cryptography. It presents many theoretical aspects of coding and cryptography, and, at the same time, many practical approaches for symmetric, public key, and cryptanalysis systems. The information covered by the book is of current interest, but a good knowledge of cryptography and mathematical tools is assumed.

From my point of view, the book’s main audience is researchers employed in designing, evaluating, and protecting sensitive information in information systems. I think anyone who wants to study or design a system for crypto-protecting sensitive data will find useful information in this book.

In conclusion, researchers or graduate students interested in the design of cryptographic solutions, protocols, and algorithms for information security are highly advised to read this book. After reading parts of it, one will understand why cryptography must be studied and developed in a professional manner, since an amateur approach to cryptography can often be worse than no cryptography at all. Books such as this are vital to ensuring the progress of theoretical and practical studies on cryptography, one of the most important technologies in the field of computer and network security. The defense line in the world of information is easily breached without high-quality cryptographic implementations.