This book is based on a course in cryptography at the upper level undergraduate and beginning graduate level that has been given at the University
of Maryland since 1997. When designing the course, we decided on the following requirements.
• The course should be up-to-date and cover a broad selection of topics
from a mathematical point of view.
• The material should be accessible to mathematically mature students
having little background in number theory and computer
programming.
• There should be examples involving numbers large enough to
demonstrate how the algorithms really work.