What is Computer Science: An Information Security Perspective

The material is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license:

You can get it as as one (fairly large) book, or individual chapters:

• Introduction
• Part I : Foundations
  • Compressing and correcting CDs
  • Writing and comparing algorithms
  • Playing hide-and-seek with virus scanners
  • How long is a piece of string?
  • Demystifying web-search: the Mathematics of PageRank
• Part II : Cryptography
  • Short programs to make and break historical ciphers
  • The Enigma of group theory
  • Generation and testing of random numbers
  • Safety in numbers: modern cryptography from ancient arithmetic
• Part III : Security
  • Hiding a needle in a haystack: concealed messages
  • Picking digital pockets
• Part IV : Advanced
  • "My buffer runneth over"
  • Is the key to your cash being leaked by your cache?
• Appendices
  • A short BASH tutorial
  • A tour of computer networking and cryptography-based network security

A printed version of this material (i.e., the 1st edition) was published by Springer, all royalties from which are donated to the UK-based Computing At School (CAS) group.