Preface

Abstract

Security is a very old concern, which until rather recently was mostly of interest in military or diplomatic circles, and therefore of rather limited interest to the public at large. The deployment of electronic commerce changed this drastically. This started notably with the advent of computerized communication in the 1970s, and with smart cards in the 1980s. Smart cards are really computers on a chip, and need to engage in securized dialogues with cash dispensers, payment terminals or other computer equipment. While this certainly made the concern for security more widespread, notably in the computer and telecommunications industry, it was certainly the hype around Internet and so-called e-commerce – electronic commerce over the World-Wide Web – of the late 1990s that made the notion of security, and in particular of cryptology and cryptographic protocols, a fundamental issue in computers and networks. (...)