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Comment by nfoz | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

Wow! 2015 crypto is that outdated now?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?

Cryptography Engineering is essentially a re-release of Practical Cryptography, which was published in 2003.

For the audience that Practical Cryptography contemplates, I like both Real World Cryptography by Wong, and Serious Cryptography by JP Aumasson.

Ahh makes sense. Thanks!

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