The proceedings of the Third International Conference on Advances in Information Security and Its Applications (ISA) contains 16 papers that are related to the multifaceted aspects of information security and assurance. The papers mostly focus on attacks and protections for real-life applications, including wireless sensor network (WSN) security, user authentication, access control, security engineering, virus protection, and digital forensics. This book will be useful to both information technology (IT) security researchers and practitioners. It presents the information security and assurance field’s progress, although it might not be the best choice for beginners.

Although it is impossible to comment on every paper, I strongly recommend “Designing low-cost cryptographic hardware for wired- or wireless point-to-point connections.” It presents a low-cost technique for lightweight symmetric key exchange that extends and optimizes the existing results. It is well written and easy to understand, and the author provides experimental results that support the design.

Based on its editorial and technical qualities, the proceedings of ISA 2009 are suitable for researchers, graduate students (as a reference), and engineers (for self-study).