This book serves as a fully updated and comprehensive introduction to cryptography, network security applications, and system security. The new topics in the third American edition include extensive coverage of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), a new presentation of stream ciphers, including the widely used RC4 algorithm, extensive coverage of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a detailed introduction to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, as well as new references to the international security evaluation criteria initiative (Common Criteria).

The book includes the following among many other topics:

• Symmetric encryption and message confidentiality: symmetric block encryption algorithms, stream ciphers and RC4, key distribution.
• Public key cryptography and message authentication: secure hashing functions and HMAC, principles and algorithms of public key cryptography, digital signatures.
• Authentication applications: Kerberos, X.509 certification service, public key infrastructure, Kerberos encryption techniques.
• Email security: Pretty Good Privacy - PGP, S/MIME, data compression using ZIP, radix-64 conversion, random number generation in PGP.
• IP security: Overview and architecture of IPSEC, authentication header, security payload encapsulation, security associations management, key management, networking, and Internet protocols.
• Web security: socket layer and transport layer security, secure electronic transactions.
• Network management security: the SNMP protocol, SNMPv1 community service, SNMPv3 protocol.
• Intruders: intrusion detection and password management, the illusion of the basic rate.
• Malware: viruses and related threats, countermeasures, distributed denial of service attacks.
• Firewalls: design, trusted systems, criteria for security evaluation.