Disappearing Cryptography: Being and Nothingness on the Net (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Software Engineering and Programming) [Paperback]

Peter Wayner (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0127386718 | ISBN-13: 978-0127386713 | Publication Date: May 6, 1996

This book deals with how information can disappear so that no one knows of its existence. Convential cryptography merely scambles information into an impenetrable block. This book describes how data can be hidden in the background noise of pictures, sound recording or even bad poetry.Disappearing Cryptography is a collection of mathematical tricks and computational sleights of hand that explore the very foundations of information.


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* Visual stenography
* Covers textual cryptoanalysis
* Discusses how to set up networks with hidden communications

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Disappearing Cryptography, by Peter Wayner, asks what happens after you use encryption to encode your data. After all, encryption doesn't protect you from a jammed transmission, a diverted e-mail message, or an erased file. The gobbledygook that is encrypted data often attracts attention. But there are ways to hide data so that no one knows it's there. Wayner carefully walks the reader through the fundamentals of encryption, error correction, secret sharing, compression, and grammar. Each technique builds on the next until you are able to pull off some impressive tricks using these technologies. You can secret your journals in a picture of your dog or encode your financials as a baseball announcer's monologue.

Each chapter begins with a clever anecdote or game that introduces the subject (sometimes elliptically, which is only appropriate for a book on data hiding). A plain-language description of the technology follows, and each chapter finishes with mathematically rigorous proofs and solutions. If you are a newcomer, you will enjoy the new ideas, though you will have to trust that the technology works. If you understand some of what's going on, you will appreciate the new information and applications, as well as the in-depth descriptions of the technologies. And if you are an expert, you will still certainly find something to take away from Wayner's clever way of integrating ideas, which at times recalls Douglas R. Hofstedter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

About the Author

Peter Wayner is a writer living in Baltimore and is the author of Digital Cash and Agents at Large (both Academic Press). His writings appear in numerous academic journals as well as the pages of more popular forums such as MacWorld and the New York Times. He has taught various computer science courses at Cornell University and Georgetown University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 295 pages
• Publisher: Academic Press (May 6, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0127386718
• ISBN-13: 978-0127386713
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,441,409 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Think Steganography rather than Cryptography., November 2, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Disappearing Cryptography: Being and Nothingness on the Net (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Software Engineering and Programming) (Paperback)

This book is about concealing the very existence of your messages where cryptography is about obscuring the content of them alone. The two are not quite the same thing, as you'll find out within.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A nice treatment of an important technology, October 22, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Disappearing Cryptography: Being and Nothingness on the Net (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Software Engineering and Programming) (Paperback)

Steganography is the science of hiding information in plain sight. That is, making it look like something else. This book goes through a number of different schemes for hiding your messages in digital versions of photographs, songs or text. The science is quite good, although the book is getting a bit old. Perhaps the author will issue an updated version soon.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting primer on the foundations of steganography, October 23, 1998

By 

S. Brown "s_brown" (Potsdam, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Disappearing Cryptography: Being and Nothingness on the Net (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Software Engineering and Programming) (Paperback)

The book provides a basic foundation for the field of steganography. Steganography essentially conceals a message within another context as opposed to cryptography which conceals the content of the messages through mathematical manipulation.

Portions of the book are interesting and informative. For persons new to cryptography, this text will provide good food-for-thought. The concise descriptions of parity bits, bit math, and compression algorithms are very interesting.

The treatment of steganography is good but does not really go into implementation details. That is, the topic is discussed conceptually.

The book was published in 1996. The dated approach is starting to show in the text. In all, it is still an interesting read.