This manual documents the outcome of the EC sponsored project RACE Integrity Primitives Evaluation (R1040), RIPE. This project is a huge joint 350 man-month project conducted by 16 leading European security experts. This book offers expert advice to professionals seeking to secure information systems by applying up-to-date cryptographic techniques. The core of this volume is a detailed integrity primitives portfolio recommendation. Among the issues addressed are security services, integrity mechanisms, data origin authentication, entity authentication, access control, data integrity, non-repudiation, signatures, and key exchange.