Crypto from Tesco

You can now order the new Block Cipher Companion book from Tesco’s, just published this month. I have seen an earlier draft and the text is very detailed and comprehensive, as you would expect from authors of this caliber.

Block Cipher Bible coming

There is a new and authoritative block cipher book soon to be published, by my good friend Lars Knudsen and my respected colleague Matt Robshaw. These are two of the top experts in the field – both veterans of the AES selection process and long time contributors to understanding why and what makes a good - or simply not a bad - block cipher. The book will be available this year and you can pre-order from Amazon right now.

The Blank Swan

There is  a new book, published in April, called The Blank Swan: The End of Probability. This is a clever title and the front photo is wonderful as well.

The book seems to be saying that financial market processes simply cannot be captured using the conventional notions of probability. The author writes in summary

The current crisis has led us to a conceptual impasse regarding the financial market. No prediction model can apply to the market …

Probability has to be discarded and a new category has to emerge instead, which will mediate contingency …

In fact, the market has nothing to do with Wall Street or with the investment banks. Market-making is a creative activity. The market is a category of thought that is independent of ideology. It replaces probability altogether and discarding the market, like the philosophers of the radical change claim we should do, is like discarding probability!

Not a very positive review from Reading the Markets, who found the book quite hard to read. There is some discussion on a Wilmott mailing list as well.

Outline of a book on Passwords

I have uploaded to my Google site an outline of a book I started to write in 2003 on passwords. At the time I had a few months away from work and I decided to return to some basics in security, and I started with passwords in Windows. I was surprised at how complex, or at least detailed, this topic turned out to be. I was somewhat inspired by also reading Richard Smith’s nice book Authentication: from Passwords to Public keys. You will find many references to his book in my draft.

My draft does have some good references, a list of passwords threats and a nice glossary. Looking at the TOC you get some idea of how much there is to cover.

I am not sure I will get back to completing the book, though I would surely like to. I make regular posts on passwords and they are certainly one of my pet security topics. However time has eluded me (so far) and perhaps you can use the material.

Some books on Scribd

As I mentioned in my last post, there is a lot of very interesting and detailed content of all types being uploaded to Scribd. According to Wikipedia,

Scribd is a document sharing website. It houses 'more than 2 million documents' and 'drew more than 21 million unique visitors in May 2008, little more than a year after launching, and claims 1.5 million registered users.' The site was initially funded with $12,000 funding from Y Combinator, but has since received over $3.7 million from Redpoint Ventures and The Kinsey Hills Group.

You can even find whole books on the site. Here are some interesting documents that I found from a hour or so of searching

• Probability for Dummies
• Simulation and Monte Carlo with Applications
• Podcast Business Models
• Excel 2007 for Scientists
• Risk Analysis: Theory and Practice

I think I will drop my Safari account as I now have enough reading for far more than foreseeable future. I also uploaded a paper that I co-wrote on Data Centric Security
A Data Centric Security Model

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Computer Science Technology security data centric securit