Customer Reviews

Protocols for Authentication and Key Establishment

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Working in industry and having served the research community reviewing cryptographic protocols for years, I have been privileged to witness a fact: designing cryptographic protocols is a no-ending job. This is an inevitable result of the fact that our society is now entering the information era for which new and diversified applicational or functional requirements for secure communications are endless. So, increasingly more new protocols will yet be invented. For a piece of supporting evidence, International Security Protocols Workshop, an annual in Cambridge University specialising in security protocols, has been 12 years. The increasing demand for new protocols has not only been responded by a large number of new research proposals authored by professional cryptographers and information security researchers, but also encouraged many security engineers in hi-tech companies to join the trade of protocol design. Notice that the population of the latter group will grow despite of the fact that the notorious difficulty of making security protocols correct has made the former group of people to litter the area with numerous flawed protocols.

The book of Boyd and Mathuria is a responsible work facing the above conflicting phenomenon. It begins with a tutorial introduction to authentication and key establishment protocols which is easily accessible by any one who wants to take up the challenging job of protocol design (it actually targets people in the second group above). It then takes an exhaustive approach to document past proposals with analysis and error demonstration. In addition, it also explains methodologies and principles for making protocols correct. Finally, it includes important standards which are vital leads to follow. So, whether you are a seasoned information security professional or an engineer aiming to become a good protocol designer, this book will help you greatly. It is worthy having a copy even for the purpose of a complete menu for protocol designers: "have I checked this sort of attack?"