
Handbook of Applied Cryptography (2001) - rfreytag
http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/hac/
======
JoachimSchipper
This is _old_ cryptography. This book should not be quite as bad for its
readers as Schneier's Applied Cryptography (which includes many ciphers which
were known to be broken at the time, with little hint of that fact in the
text), but it's still old-fashioned.

E.g.

\- Chapter 7 "block ciphers" doesn't even _mention_ CTR mode, but does mention
CFB and OFB. Modern cryptosystems all use CTR mode, and no new system I'm
aware of uses CFB or OFB.

\- Chapter 8 "Public-Key Encryption" doesn't even _mention_ elliptic-curve
cryptography, despite almost all new cryptosystems being based on that in some
form or another. This chapter also doesn't appear to mention RSA padding,
which is crucial to a secure RSA implementation.

\- Chapter 9 "Hash Functions and Data Integrity" doesn't mention anything
newer than SHA-1. But SHA-1 is thoroughly deprecated, and will be broken in
the next few years.

Just buy a new book instead; I hear good things about Cryptography
Engineering, and I liked "An Introduction to Modern Cryptography" (more
mathematical, less engineering-focused).

~~~
egjerlow
What about the updated Cryptography engineering book by Schneier et al? Do you
have any experience with it?

~~~
tptacek
[http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical-
cryp...](http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical-
cryptography/)

~~~
nxzero
Aside from Stack Exchange, are there any other good cryptography Q&A forums:

[http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes](http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes)

[http://security.stackexchange.com/tags](http://security.stackexchange.com/tags)

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silenteh
If you are looking for a free book about applied cryptography, in my opinion
this is the best you can find:

[https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/cryptobook/](https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/cryptobook/)

~~~
user2994cb
And Dan Boneh's Coursera course is excellent too (maybe one day he will get
around to doing the endlessly postponed part 2).

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j2kun
Some chapters in this book (e.g. Chapter 4) contain very useful knowledge
about practical algorithms for working with the underlying mathematical
objects used as cryptographic primitives. Some that I found particularly
useful in studying elliptic curve cryptography was the section on irreducible
polynomials over finite fields.

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canistr
Anyone have any thoughts on Communication System Security
([https://www.crcpress.com/Communication-System-
Security/Chen-...](https://www.crcpress.com/Communication-System-
Security/Chen-Gong/9781439840368))?

I learned quite a bit from this book in undergrad which is also written by a
UW professor (Guang Gong).

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curiousgal
2001? Call an appeal to authority but I'll wait and see what tptacek has to
say about this.

