Suggested Books for Learning Cryptography? 14
Kismet asks: "I see a lot of news and reviews about encryption on Slashdot regularly. The subject seems rather interesting. I suppose that cryptography is covered in CS classes, but for hobbyists, what is the best way to learn? What kind of math background does one need? Are there any good "beginning" books on the subject? What is the history of Cryptography? "
Applied Cryptography (Score:3)
Best of all, it is a real pleasure to read. Schneier really captures the interesting aspects of the field.
For more info, check out the Slashdot review [slashdot.org].
"Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
(Score:1)
Re:Applied Cryptography (Score:1)
If you are looking for history of crypto and live near Washington DC, there is a national cryptography museum that the NSA runs. It doesn't have much to do with the current cryptographic techniques, but it does have a lot of WWII history pertaining to cryptography.
There are also good websites that i can't think of the name of right now. Finally, sci.crypt and one of the many cypherpunks lists sometimes carry good discussions. (If you decide to join a cypherpunks list, prepare to recieve a LOT of junk mail.)
--
"New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract ideas, but in the fight for daily bread..."
Re: history of Cryptography (Score:2)
Yep, Applied Cryptography is a great start (Score:1)
Applied Cryptography (Score:1)
Conference Papers and HAC (Score:2)
BTW, I didn't really feel AC was really that great... he ignores of a lot of important details, which is fine for a simple overview, but it makes it hard to do anything useful based soley on the information contained within AC.
Really, the best referece is the conference papers from the Fast Software Encryption, Crypto, EuroCrypt, AusCrypt (now defunct?), and AsiaCrypt conferences (also the AES conferences, but there will only be 3 of those). Most (probably all, actually) are published in the LCNS series by Springer (lots of good titles, check them out).
Also, a lot of good stuff is available on the web, since most of the academic people who write papers put them up on the web, and commercial companies often publish things in RFCs, etc. Here are a few to start you out:
Blowfish: http://www.counterpane.com/bfsverlag.html
CAST5: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2144.txt
Tiger: http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~biham/Reports/Tiger
MD2, MD4, MD5, RC5, and others are avaialable as RFCs as well (use the search, Luke!).
Ok, one more, all of the AES Canadates are
at http://www.nist.gov/aes/
Also, looking at crypto code often is helpful for understanding what's going on (since you can relate your programming knowledge to the crypto).
Good luck
Applied Cryptography, by Bruce Schneier (Score:1)
- It explains a lot of the maths required. However I'd still suggest you shell out your good ol' matrix & calculus books... You really _really_ need a good background in maths to be able to make proper use of crypto.
- Great examples... I fell in love with Eva.
- Not only that, but there's SOURCE CODE! Yeah! So if you're simply a copycat, you can grab the code at the end of the book and have fun with it.
- If you're a cypherphreak, you can always look at the massive bibliography at the end. So this book is a really good "starting point" book.
Have fun!
Mike
Re:oh no!!!! (Score:1)
Less Technical, perhaps? (Score:1)
More technical (Score:2)
One good book for working your way up from easy intro to much tougher advanced material is William Stalling's Cryptography and Network Security. It also has a great reference section for finding other texts. The book is used in a lot of university intro to crypto courses.
For math, try Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science, by Donald Knuth, Oren Patashnik, and Ronald Graham.
Doug Stinson Cryptography: Theory and Practice (Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications), is also good.
There are a lot of very advanced technical papers available on the web. This stuff will make your head hurt if you don't already have a decent background to draw on. Search the web for postings of the Crypto consortiums, look especially for Proceedings, Crypto '9x, EuroCrypt 9x, AsiaCrypt, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Communications of the ACM, and Cryptobytes, or try the legendary names in your favorite search engine.
the AC