  The main purpose of this paper is to give an overview over the theory of
abelian varieties, with main focus on Jacobian varieties of curves reaching
from well-known results till to latest developments and their usage in
cryptography. In the first part we provide the necessary mathematical
background on abelian varieties, their torsion points, Honda-Tate theory,
Galois representations, with emphasis on Jacobian varieties and hyperelliptic
Jacobians. In the second part we focus on applications of abelian varieties on
cryptography and treating separately, elliptic curve cryptography, genus 2 and
3 cryptography, including Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange, index calculus in Picard
groups, isogenies of Jacobians via correspondences and applications to discrete
logarithms. Several open problems and new directions are suggested.
