The creation of public key cryptography by Diffie and Hellman in 1976 and the
subsequent invention of the RSA public key cryptosystem by Rivest, Shamir,
and Adleman in 1978 are watershed events in the long history of secret communications.
It is hard to overestimate the importance of public key cryptosystems
and their associated digital signature schemes in the modern world
of computers and the Internet. This book provides an introduction to the
theory of public key cryptography and to the mathematical ideas underlying
that theory.