NIST Special Publication 800-2

Citation
National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST Special Publication 800-2: Public Key Cryptography (Apr. 1991) (full-text).

Overview
This publication presents a state-of-the-art survey of public-key cryptography circa 1988-1990. In doing so, it covers a number of different topics including: the theory of public-key cryptography, comparisons to conventional, secret-key cryptography, a largely self-contained summary of relevant mathematics, a survey of major existing public-key systems, an exploration of digital signatures and hash functions, a survey of public-key implementations in networks, an introduction to zero-knowledge protocols and probabilistic encryption, and an exploration of security issues and key sizes.