A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography

https://toc.cryptobook.us/

by ColinWright • 5 years ago

340 52 5 years ago

toc.cryptobook.us

I was just looking at resources for a complete beginner to get started with Cryptography for Infosec/CyberSec and this book topped all the recommendations. Hoping to see it updated soon.

pvg• 5 years ago

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22980003

dang2• 5 years ago

Thanks! Expanded list:

A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28784207 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)

A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22980003 - April 2020 (36 comments)

A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22013751 - Jan 2020 (76 comments)

A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10119029 - Aug 2015 (23 comments)

Nursie2• 5 years ago

I loved Dan Boneh's "Crypto 1" course on coursera about 10 years ago, and signed up for "Crypto 2" immediately. After a few years of postponement I unsubscribed from the emails, I guess it never happened :(

But I will take a look through this as it looks like it covers some of the same ground and then continues from there...

xNeil• 5 years ago

https://www.coursera.org/learn/crypto2 Is this it?

Tomte• 5 years ago

Yes, it's been in that waiting state forever and even links to the submitted online book as a substitute to look at.

thecleaner2• 5 years ago

Anybody ever understand the attack game setups ? I felt like its a bit overcomplicated just to prove a contradiction. Also I am not sure if the metrics introduced like SSAdv and Message recovery advantage actually are used in places other than this book.

suddensleep2• 5 years ago

In my experience working through the first few chapters, I'll say that the attack game framework is pretty standard across lots of course materials from universities (at least the ones that I've found posted online). One thing that is not consistent is the notation used; it seems like there are multiple competing (but essentially equivalent) sets of notations used in attack game/advantage discussions.

atilimcetin2• 5 years ago

Also I can highly recommend Introduction to Cryptography course by Christof Paar - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1usFRN4LCMcfIV7UjHNuQg (and the text book https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-04101-3 but you may not need it)

About 2-3 years ago, I've watched all the lectures and then a couple of months ago I've watched them again to remember the details. It's joy watching Christof giving cryptography lectures.

lordofgibbons• 5 years ago

Would you say this intro course is a prerequisite to taking the applied course linked by OP?

atilimcetin2• 5 years ago

After looking into the TOC of A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography, I would say the contents of these two are pretty similar to each other.

suddensleep2• 5 years ago

I've worked through the entire Paar book (which is excellent), and I've made a number of attempts at getting through Boneh and Shoup (which is also excellent). I will say that there is a good overlap in content, but the Boneh/Shoup is solidly graduate-level, whereas Paar is a good and solid introduction for an undergraduate student.

jszymborski• 5 years ago

Is there any chance the LaTeX files available for this book? I'd love to try my hand at binding a physical copy but would need to get the page size to A5.

grifball2• 5 years ago

Lemme know if you find them

363849473754553• 5 years ago

I want to understand the math in this book. What background and recommended resources do you guys recommend to learn to understand it?

ngngngng• 5 years ago

What's your background? I just started A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics because I also got stuck on math when I was previously studying cryptography. Not sure if it will actually solve my problem but so far seems like a great place to start.

https://pimbook.org/

363849473754553• 5 years ago

I’m a beginner in math. I know the basics of proofs.

antegamisou2• 5 years ago

You'd need a good grasp on Discrete Math, Probability Theory and most likely Number theory.

For the first, Rosen's "Discrete Math and Its Applications" is quite thorough including many solved & unsolved problems.

There are too many good resources for probability & number theory to choose from, so I'd recommend something like MIT OCW for the first one, at least.

363849473754553• 5 years ago

Can you send a link for the probability course that you have in mind? Thanks for the discrete rec!

hwers• 5 years ago

I never really understood the appeal of nerding out on cryptography. As soon as you get it in your mind to do some fun innovating people tell you (correctly) to "never roll your own crypto". Unless you're super talented at math (on the PhD level) and actually could roll it on your own then I don't really see why you shouldn't just abstract it in your head as a solved problem like modern day assembly code arcana (though I guess I'm curious about other peoples perspective).

dr_zoidberg• 5 years ago

I work in digital forensics. You wouldn't believe the misconceptions about "crypthgraphic hashes" and cryptography in general that are around in my area. If everyone took an intro course to cryptography that wouldn't happen as much as it does.

So there you have, one reason to take this course that is not "roll your own crypto" (which you should never do, unless you really really really know what you're doing. And even then you should check with a few people smarter than you to make sure everything is as you think it is.

lbriner• 5 years ago

You are right that the basics are often misunderstood but an Intro course this is not! Knowing what prime factoring is can be interesting if you like maths but definitely not required to understand on a practical level the difference between symmetrical, asymmetrical and things like CSPRNG vs hashing.

vlovich1233• 5 years ago

First, those people don’t materialize out of nowhere. They usually learn from this kind of content.

Secondly, the “don’t roll your own crypto” is general advice. It means “you’re probably trying to solve a problem that already has a battle-tested solution.

A lot of really talented people clearly roll their own crypto, otherwise we wouldn’t regularly have innovation in this field (although to be fair probably 90% of the ones that get traction are from DJB).

Finally, even if you should troll your own crypto algorithm, you probably still need to apply it to your problem domain. Understanding how to think about those attack vectors helps you understand the trade offs of which algorithms to pick. This makes the collaboration with a security team/security review more meaningful.

tptacek6• 5 years ago

We don't regularly get innovation from generalists who pick up and figure out cryptography on their own. Daniel J. Bernstein is a professor of cryptography. Most of the innovations we see in cryptography come from people with graduate degrees in cryptography.

If you're someone like that, you don't need advice from random people on the Internet about whether you should practice in your field. Obviously, you should. But if you're someone who mostly spends their time writing general-purpose software and just find cryptography super fascinating or morally compelling, you do need the advice, because the cryptography you come up with is likely to get somebody hurt.

Nursie2• 5 years ago

I never really understood the appeal of nerding out on cryptography

Gaining an understanding of how it works can help you avoid some of the pitfalls when dealing with it.

IMHO I always work better when I understand what's going on at least one layer down from where I'm playing. Nerding out on it can also help you understand how serious some attacks are and how broken your systems might be.

Never roll your own is good advice in production. Knock yourself out for test systems, for fun and exploration, but if you have some 'fun innovating' that you think might be good for real world use, pay someone that knows their stuff to audit it before trusting it. That's just common sense when it's so easy to get wrong.

FiberBundle• 5 years ago

Even if you use existing implementations, you can still use them in the wrong way and really screw up. Knowing how to correctly use implementations and what mistakes to avoid should be required for anybody using cryptography and that takes some familiarity with the material.

grifball2• 5 years ago

Yeah, there's a lot of crypto that's specifically tailored to minimizing the effect of mistakes like IV-reuse and it's not solved, the primitives can't do everything, so it's good to know these pitfalls. This book is more theoretical than that though and there's probably better sources idk.

pr07ecH70r• 5 years ago

Very nice reading.

a-dub• 5 years ago

this looks awesome! totally bookmarking it for the reading list!

particularly liking how "applied" means actual practical applications and system design.

julienchastang• 5 years ago

I'm just finishing "Cryptography: A Very Short Introduction" from the OUP series. I found it to be a useful starting point even though (as the title says) it does not go into much detail, and it is a bit dated as well (currencies are not mentioned). It does, however, cover fundamentals that you can supplement with videos and other texts.

dang2• 5 years ago

A pdf is at https://toc.cryptobook.us/book.pdf

(That was the submitted URL but we changed it to the home page of the book.)

hawk_• 5 years ago

My intro to cryptography was in a class by Victor Shoup. Highly recommend any of his books or materials. While I ended up not taking up cryptography professionally, I have fond memories from his course.

baby2• 5 years ago

If you’re looking for a less mathy introduction to cryptography, and a more applied ressource, check the book Real-World Cryptography. It wrote it over the last two years and a half and it just got released on Amazon a few weeks ago.

It teaches you about the cryptographic constructions that you run into all the time as a dev (https/ssl/tls, encryption, hashing, etc.) and gives you pointers on how not to mess things up (and what libraries to use, etc.)

I also wrote a post a while back on why I was writing this book and why you should pick it up: https://www.cryptologie.net/article/504/why-im-writing-a-boo...

thecleaner2• 5 years ago

I think the Bruce Schneiers Applied Cryptography is also really good. In fact it was written so that programmers would be able to implement algorithms from it.

foo92691• 5 years ago

Applied Cryptography is an excellent book, but it is very very old. Nearly 25 years old.

The foreword of the semi-recent (2015) "20th anniversary edition" (which appears to be a reissue of the 2nd edition) even recommends that you look for a more modern reference.

And one of the lessons of the last decades is that programmers should generally not be implementing their own cryptography unless that is their specialty.

tptacek6• 5 years ago

Applied Cryptography is probably the worst book on cryptography engineering in broad circulation. It is a scourge.

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical-cry...

It's best to think of Applied Cryptography as an almanac or a work of pop science. The worst thing you can do with it is implement directly from it.

baby2• 5 years ago

In the link I posted you can read my point of view on this:

The other two somewhat respected resources at the time were Applied Cryptography and Cryptography Engineering (both from Schneier). But these books were starting to be quite outdated. Applied Cryptography spent 4 chapters on block ciphers, with a whole chapter on cipher modes of operation but none on authenticated encryption. Cryptography Engineering had a single mention of elliptic curve cryptography (in a footnote).

anitil• 5 years ago

Happy reader here, I enjoyed following along as it was written, and am now planning on reading it through as a whole.

eric_khun• 5 years ago

loved the book, thanks for writing it

nfoz3• 5 years ago

The book that "clicked" for me is: Cryptography Engineering: Design Principles and Practical Applications, by Ferguson/Schneier/Kohno (2015) [1]

In plain language it walks through what I wanted to know, in a modern and paranoid perspective, as a readable narrative, from the point of view that we want to design each of the basic crypto primitives ourselves.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/97811187223...

tptacek6• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, Cryptography Engineering (nee Practical Cryptography) is very much showing its age. It's a much better book than Applied Cryptography, but it's still pre-modern --- it spends a lot of time on outmoded multiplicative group asymmetric encryption, essentially excludes AEAD cryptography (which are the most important constructions in modern cryptography), and has weird advice on random number generation (that probably made sense before the world standardized on OS-level CSPRNGs).

It's easy to forget how old Practical Cryptography is, but: it predates Vaudenay's padding oracle attack.

nfoz3• 5 years ago

Wow! 2015 crypto is that outdated now? Thanks for the heads up! Now I'm feeling my own age lol.

Anything else you'd recommend that isn't mentioned here yet?

A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography

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