Security News > 2021 > April > "Crypto Dictionary: 500 Cryptographic Tidbits for the Curious" is a crash course in ciphers and cryptids
What do the Bass0matic, blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs have in common? Each term shows up in Jean-Philippe Aumasson's new publication: "Crypto Dictionary: 500 Cryptographic Tidbits for the Curious." Aumasson is the chief security officer and cofounder of Taurus Group, a Swiss fintech company and the author of "Serious Cryptography: A Practical Introduction to Modern Encryption."
Aumasson writes in the preface that the dictionary is not meant to be a comprehensive look at cryptography's diverse areas.
Aumasson calls the dictionary a coffee table book that shows off the "Richness of cryptography, including its exotic and underappreciated corners, to share knowledge and be a gateway to a better appreciation of the science of secrecy."
Readers also can use the dictionary for a crash course in the field and assemble a reading list of important texts, such as "Applied Cryptography," a 1996 book by Bruce Schneier, and COPACOBANA, an academic proof of concept of an FPGA-based DES cracker and "Cryptonomicon," a novel by Neal Stephenson that relies on facts and genuine cryptographic techniques, as opposed to other books "in which the crypto is mostly made up and laughably unrealistic.
Eurocrypt: Europe's largest academic cryptography conference held in the spring.
Isogeny-based cryptography: The youngest class of post-quantum cryptography method that maps points of an elliptic curve to points of another elliptic curve and that satisfies specific mathematical properties.