Cryptography: The Key to Digital Security, How It Works, and Why It Matters

By Keith Martin

A concise, accessible and authoritative guide that tells you everything you need to know about cryptography.

Cryptography tells you everything you need to know about the keys to cyberspace.What are the implications of connecting to an unprotected Wi-Fi network? Is it really that important to have different passwords for different accounts? Could you lose all your money if you convert it to bitcoin? Can we ever be truly anonymous when online? Will quantum computers break all known cryptography, or will smarter machines make our world more secure?

Cryptography is being used, behind the scenes, to secure most of the technologies that each of us uses every day in cyberspace. It protects half of all global connections made to the world wide web. We use it when we withdraw cash from an ATM, log in to a computing device, search for information on Google, watch movies on Netflix or even use a key fob to open our car door. With Forbes predicting that cybercrime will be worth two trillion dollars by 2019, cryptography really is something that none of us can afford to ignore.

Yet in cyberspace we often leave our front doors wide open. We hand over our bank account details to strangers and we etch personal messages into tablets of digital stone that will remain legible forever. At the same time some political leaders are calling for cryptography to be weakened. A former director of the FBI says he is ‘concerned’, even ‘depressed’, about how it it is hampering intelligence gathering. Two UK prime ministers have openly stated they wanted to ban it. Indeed, a former contractor to the US National Security Agency was so worried about attempts to subvert the use of it that he gave up his career and personal freedom to share his concerns with the world.

This book is the first to demystify cryptography for the general public. By looking at why we need cryptography, what it does, how we use and abuse it, what its limitations are and why it is so controversial, it aims to provide you with a profound yet practical perspective on your own personal security in cyberspace.