In today’s world, the security of communication is paramount. Researchers have proposed many techniques for ensuring this. This book is one such effort. It is based on the doctoral dissertation [1] completed by Sheng Xiao of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the year 2013, under the guidance of Weibo Gong and Don Towsley. The work is intended for sophisticated students of computer science as well as electrical engineering. It is also meant for research workers and practitioners involved in network security and/or wireless communications.

The book includes eight chapters and four appendices. Chapter 1 offers an introduction to the subject. Communication security and key safety are examined in chapter 2. The authors explore the challenges that need to be overcome for ensuring key safety, including key cracking and key stealing.

Chapter 3 covers the key idea of the thesis and the book: dynamic secrets. The authors discuss the generation of dynamic secrets in noisy packet communications, ways of achieving true randomness at low cost, mechanisms for the automatic recovery of keys that have been stolen, and mechanisms for detecting impersonation attacks without false alarms. Dynamic wireless security is examined in chapter 4. Topics covered include dynamic secrets in the wireless local area network (LAN) link layer and proof-of-concept experiments related to computational complexity, information loss, and randomness. In addition, the authors discuss dynamic secrets in other layers of wireless communications.

The applications of dynamic secrets in smart grids are investigated in chapter 5. Dynamic key management techniques in smart grids are the main focus. Chapter 6 deals with secrecy in communications. Secrecy extraction, secret sharing, and dynamic secrets are the key concepts examined. In chapter 7, the authors look at the reliability of secure communications. Key safety is considered from the angle of reliability, and reliability analysis methods for key update schemes and two-factor authentication schemes are analyzed. Chapter 8 covers potential applications of dynamic secrets in the future. One such application is secure mobile transaction.

The appendices include information about hash functions, entropy, proofs for some of the theorems in the book, and reliability analysis for dynamic key-based two-factor authentication. There are over 100 references to the literature, along with a short index.

The authors propose the use of dynamic secrets as an accompaniment to existing secure communication systems, and highlight their benefits when keys or passwords are stolen. They strongly recommend the use of dynamic secrets in secure communication, and note that dynamic secrets complement and expand Kerckhoffs’ principle, a guideline for cryptosystem design since the 19th century. The principle asserts that security of a cryptosystem should exclusively rely on the secrecy of its key. Whether this principle is fully applicable in civilian communications is arguable. For example, keys may not be secret. They may be stolen. The authors believe that after reading this book, readers will be able to implement dynamic secrets in practical secure communication systems.

The authors’ work [2] has been studied and quoted by many researchers. The topics in the book are interesting. However, the small font size in some diagrams, equations, and figures made reading very difficult. I recommend the book for security enthusiasts.