This volume is based on a course held several times, and again in 1993, at the ESAT Laboratorium of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. These courses are intended for both researchers in computer security and cryptography and for practitioners in industry and government. The contributors of the 1991 course were invited to submit revised and updated versions of their papers for inclusion in a book. This volume is the final result; it is well- balanced between basic theory and real life applications, between mathematical background and juridical aspects, and between technical developments and standardization issues. Some of the topics are public key cryptography, hash functions, secure protocols, digital signatures, security architectures, network security, and data encryption standards (DES).

This is the first book devoted entirely to total least squares. The authors give a unified presentation of the TLS problem. A description of its basic principles are given, the various algebraic, statistical and sensitivity properties of the problem are discussed, and generalizations are presented. Applications are surveyed to facilitate uses in an even wider range of applications. Whenever possible, comparison is made with the well-known least squares methods. A basic knowledge of numerical linear algebra, matrix computations, and some notion of elementary statistics is required of the reader; however, some background material is included to make the book reasonably self-contained.