Who should attend: Those who need to understand what cryptography: does and how it works. I stress the engineering discipline, and do not assume a strong background in mathematics.

From encryption to digital signatures to electronic commerce to secure voting, cryptography has become the enabling technology that allows us to take existing business and social constructs and move them to computer networks. But a lot of cryptography is bad, and the problem with bad cryptography is that it looks just like good cryptography; most people cannot tell the difference. Security is a chain: only as strong as the weakest link.

This tutorial is about cryptography as it is used in the real world: the algorithms, the protocols, and the implementations. I'll stress the whats and the hows rather than the whys. People building (or using) cryptography need to understand what it can do and can't do, and that it's not the panacea it's often made out to be. Topics covered include:

	Basics of cryptography
	Symmetric cryptography: DES, triple-DES, IDEA, Blowfish, RC2, RC4, RC5, AES
	Public-key cryptography: encryption and digital signatures, RSA, Diffie-Hellman, ElGamal, DSA
	Hash functions and message authentication codes: MD4, MD5, SHA, CBC-MAC, HMAC, NMAC
	Random number generation
	Protocols: key exchange, authentication, secret sharing, key escrow, certificates, digital cash
	What cryptography can do for you
	What cryptography can't do for you

No single tutorial can teach someone to be a cryptographer. After completing this tutorial, participants will be intelligent consumers of cryptography. They will understand cryptography's building blocks, how those building blocks are put together to make cryptographic system, and what the limitations of the science are.

Bruce Schneier is president of Counterpane Systems, a cryptography and computer security consulting company. He is the author of Applied Cryptography, the seminal work in its field. He has written dozens of articles on cryptography for major magazines and designed the popular Blowfish encryption algorithm, still unbroken after years of cryptanalysis.

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