Error-Correcting Codes, Finite Geometries and Cryptography

Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary volume contains papers from both a conference and special session on Error-Control Codes, Information Theory and Applied Cryptography. The conference was held at the Fields Institute in Toronto, On, Canada from December 5-6, 2007, and the special session was held at the Canadian Mathematical Society's winter meeting in London, ON, Canada from December 8-10, 2007. The volume features cutting-edge theoretical results on the Reed-Muller and Reed-Solomon codes, classical linear codes, codes from nets and block designs, LDPC codes, perfect quantum and orthogonal codes, iterative decoding, magnetic storage and digital memory devices, and MIMO channels. There are new contributions on privacy reconciliation, resilient functions, cryptographic hash functions, and new work on quantum coins. Related original work in finite geometries concerns two-weight codes coming from partial spreads, (0, 1) matrices with forbidden configurations, Andre embeddings, and representations of projective spaces in affine planes. Great care has been taken to ensure that high expository standards are met by the papers in this volume. Accordingly, the papers are written in a user-friendly format. The hope is that this volume will be of interst and of benefit both to the experienced and to newcomers alike.