Book Description

It is now a decade since the appearance of W. Diffie and M. E. Hellmann's startling paper, "New Directions in Cryptography". This paper not only established the new field of public-key cryptography but also awakened scientific interest in secret-key cryptography, a field that had been the almost exclusive domain of secret agencies and mathematical hobbyist. A number of ex cellent books on the science of cryptography have appeared since 1976. In the main, these books thoroughly treat both public-key systems and block ciphers (i. e. secret-key ciphers with no memo ry in the enciphering transformation) but give short shrift to stream ciphers (i. e. , secret-key ciphers wi th memory in the enciphering transformation). Yet, stream ciphers, such as those . implemented by rotor machines, have played a dominant role in past cryptographic practice, and, as far as I can determine, re main still the workhorses of commercial, military and diplomatic secrecy systems. My own research interest in stream ciphers found a natural re sonance in one of my doctoral students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Rainer A. Rueppe1. As Rainer was completing his dissertation in late 1984, the question arose as to where he should publish the many new results on stream ciphers that had sprung from his research.