Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This book presents a novel conceptual primer on steganography but sorely disappoints in the areas of cryptography and overall applicable code.

The book has a number of shortcomings which prevent it from receiving a good review.

-the author's artificial examples on English grammar construction create sentences that are likely to be repetitious, inconsistent, and implausible if read aloud. The author lacks the sources and dictionary to back up his premise these programmatically constructed sentences can sound okay when next to each other. He passes an advanced grammar check but doesn't pass a child's reading of the fake text. -the discussions of RSA and DES had great analogies but the detailed explanations were poor. -the code is all in Pascal (I expect C code available via a URL. I don't have any use for *.p Pascal code!) -the author goes off on tangents about reversible and fault-tolerant computing. The composition of the book is a mixture of a good steganography text mixed in with a mediocre cryptography discussion and an even more mediocre computer architecture presentation. -The discussions of error-correcting codes were theoretically interesting but the author is consistently short of USABLE code examples so that we can experiment with his ideas.