Additional Reading

• Schneier’s Applied Cryptography (John Wiley & Sons, 1995) remains the best generally available work on cryptographic algorithms and protocols. There are many other good texts on the subject, but this is probably the most complete. I recommend it very highly if you’re interested in cryptography or cryptology.

• Bauer’s Decrypted Secrets (Springer-Verlag, 2002) might be more approachable than Schneier’s book; it’s quite a bit shorter, and it includes a wealth of interesting historical anecdotes and facts.

• Smith’s Internet Cryptography (Addison-Wesley, 1997) describes SSL/TLS, S/MIME, IPsec, and other network-oriented cryptographic security protocols clearly, but in great detail.

• The Kerberos protocol is described in Internet RFC 1510 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1510.txt). Microsoft’s TechNet site (http://technet.microsoft.com) has a wealth of useful information on Kerberos and Microsoft’s Windows implementation of the services described in the RFC. In particular, there’s a good white paper, “Windows 2000 Kerberos Authentication,” that describes in great detail how Windows uses Kerberos authentication.

• The Cryptography Frequently Asked Questions list (http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/faq/index.html), maintained by RSA Data Security, thoroughly covers a variety of questions, including some that you might not have thought of.

• The amusingly named Big Book of IPsec RFCs by Loshin (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999) collects all of the IPsec RFCs into a single, neatly bound, well-indexed volume. If you’re really interested in learning about IPsec, this is a valuable reference.