Cryptography and network security are hot topics and have relevance in civilian as well as military applications. This book on computation, cryptography, and network security has its origins in a conference held in April 2013, at the Hellenic Military Academy, Greece. It was edited by researchers Nicholas Daras and Michael Rassias and contains 28 highly technical papers by various experts. The stated audience for the book includes academicians, decision makers, engineers, experts in the field of operations research, the armed forces, and practitioners.

The papers in the book focus on many different topics and are listed in no particular order; therefore, I will look at papers related to cryptography and security first, as they form the bulk of the book. Alexandropoulos et al. discuss ways of metamorphosing cryptographic schemes through the Aitken and Neville interpolation techniques and inverse interpolation methods. Alhamdan et al. look at stream ciphers, which provide confidentiality in many applications such as the Internet, pay TV, and mobile phone communications. They highlight and report many flaws that occur in the initialization process of stream ciphers. Daras discusses concepts related to network-centric warfare. The security of network-centric operations is investigated by employing vertex pursuit games. Demertzis and Iliadis propose “a bio-inspired hybrid artificial intelligence framework for cyber security.” They use bio-inspired machine learning methods for protecting military networks. Konstantinou and Kontogeorgis study the complex multiplication method for constructing elliptic curves widely used in cryptography. Markoutis et al. analyze secret sharing schemes and apply multivariate Birkhoff interpolation in contrast to earlier methods, which applied Lagrange interpolation, hyperplane geometry, and univariate Birkhoff interpolation.

Mourouzis and Courtois examine various “differential attacks against the GOST block cipher and its variants.” Nagurney et al. describe a supply chain game theory framework comprising retailers and consumers that are involved in Internet transactions and may be vulnerable to cyber attacks. Nastou et al. look at a technique for producing private and anonymous physical spaces made by technological means. For this, they use credentials based on attributes. Poulakis and Rolland depict a digital signature scheme based on integer factorization and the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. Rolland talks about the applications of randomness in cryptography. Tams et al. survey security issues in biometric applications. Volos et al. look at an image encryption scheme based on chaos theory. De la Hoz et al. outline the design of secure communication using chaos theory, and actualize it using Arduino microcontrollers.

The remaining papers are on topics as varied as fuzzy inclusion, orthogonal polynomials, unstable equilibrium points, integral estimates, divergence measures in information theory, zeroes of a polynomial, Durrmeyer type operators, Laplace-transform inequalities, Hermite-Hadamard type inequalities, entropy and information measures, vector spaces, limit-computable functions, and Yang-Hilbert type integral inequalities.

The book is very specialized and mathematically sophisticated; consequently, only those familiar with the topics will be comfortable with it. A number of practical applications are considered in the book. The papers related to cryptography and network security are quite interesting. The publication of the book is timely and the topics in the book are of current interest. As the papers in the book have been written by various authors, the writing style is varied; however, the editors have ensured uniformity in exposition. I strongly recommend this book for its intended audience.