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49 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Solid coverage for professionals, students and instructors, November 27, 1998
By A Customer
This book is intended to serve both as a textbook for an academic course of study, and as a self-study and reference guide for practicing professionals. The material has been extended to emphasize encryption and its central position in network protection. The structure and flow have been reorganized with both classroom use and solo instruction in mind, and additional teaching material, such as additional problems, have been added.Chapter one is an introduction to the topics to be covered. In a practical way it outlines the concerns involved in the phrase computer security, and the priorities occasioned by the networked nature of modern computing. There is also an outline of the chapters and sequence in the rest of the book. While the text does note that cryptographic techniques underlie most of current security technologies this is only done briefly. Examples in the major categories listed would help explain this primary position. Part one deals with conventional, symmetric, encryption and the various methods of attacking it. Chapter two covers the historical substitution and transposition ciphers. Symmetric block ciphers are discussed in chapter three, illustrated by an explanation of DES (Data Encryption Standard). The additional conventional algorithms of triple DES, IDEA (International Data Encryption Algorithm), and RC5 are reviewed in chapter four. The use of conventional encryption for confidentiality is outlined in chapter five. Part three looks at public-key encryption and hash functions. Chapter six introduces public-key encryption and its uses in confidentiality, authentication, and key management and exchange. Number theory is the basis of these modern algorithms, so some basic mathematical concepts are outlined in chapter seven. Digital signatures and message authentication is introduced in some detail in chapter eight. The algorithms themselves are explained in chapter nine, including MD5 (Message Digest algorithm), SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm), and others. Protocols using digital signatures are described in chapter ten. Part three takes this background material and relates its use in security practice. Chapter eleven looks at authentication, concentrating on Kerberos and X.509. The examples of e-mail security systems given in chapter twelve are PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension). Security provisions for the Internet Protocol (IP) itself are reviewed in chapter thirteen. Web security, in chapter fourteen, again concentrates on protocol level matters, but also discusses the SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) standard at the application level. Part four outlines general system security. To the general public the primary concern of security is to deal with intruders and malicious software, so it may seem odd to the uninitiated to find that both of these subjects are lumped together in chapter fifteen. Chapter sixteen finishes off the book with a description of firewalls and the concept of trusted systems that they rely on. Each chapter ends with a set of recommended readings and problems. Many chapters also have appendices giving additional details of specific topics related to the subject just discussed.
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by Abraham Silberschatz
by Greg Hoglund
by Bruce Schneier
