Cryptography: A Primer

One of the first American textbooks to treat cryptography as ordinary applied mathematics rather than as a government subject.

Alan Konheim wrote it out of IBM Research, where the Data Encryption Standard had been developed a few years earlier, and Wiley published it in 1981. The book is more rigorous than its title suggests: probability and the statistics of language come first, then substitution and transposition systems worked through as mathematics rather than as puzzles, then rotor machines, then DES in detail, and finally the public-key work of the preceding five years. Exercises run through all 432 pages.

Konheim went on to teach computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and returned to the material in Computer Security and Cryptography (2007). The primer belongs to the short shelf of books, with Kahn's history and Dorothy Denning's Cryptography and Data Security of 1982, that carried the subject into university teaching in the years when the open literature on it was still small enough to read.