ThecreationofpublickeycryptographybyDi?eandHellmanin1976andthe subsequent invention of the RSA public key cryptosystem by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman in 1978 are watershed events in the long history of secret c- munications. It is hard to overestimate the importance of public key cr- tosystems and their associated digital signature schemes in the modern world of computers and the Internet. This book provides an introduction to the theory of public key cryptography and to the mathematical ideas underlying that theory. Public key cryptography draws on many areas of mathematics, including number...