Crypto 101 – Introductory course on cryptography

Post by john_reel » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 2:41 PM UTC

Cyph0n wrote: post #40

dom0 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course; my point is (and I assume that's also the point of other people who assert similar stances on the topic) that the average programmer or software engineer should leave these things to recognized cryptographers. This also highlights a peculiarity with cryptography, in that it is very hard to understand for laymen (assuming laymen are ppl with some CS or math education), so most arguments in discussions of la…

Look at DES or MD5. Were they not designed by cryptographers? Or how about the whole Dual_EC_RBG backdoor fiasco? Yes, there was criticism right from the start, but it was adopted and used widely as far as I know. Heck, Dual_EC_RBG was only ousted in 2013: "The ANSI X9F1 Tool Standards and Guidelines Group which discussed the backdoor also included three employees from the prominent security company RSA Security.[6]…

Post by milansm » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 3:13 PM UTC

eponeponepon wrote: post #3

This is about to eat my weekend, I think! :) Quite seriously, this is exactly what the tech world needs - personally, I know that in terms of understanding of crypto I'm streets ahead of the average Joe, but orders of magnitude behind people who actually know the field. I'm certain I'm far from alone in that set, but the way the world's going means that we with the generalised technical know-how have a moral impetus…

Post by mSparks » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 3:33 PM UTC

kaoD wrote: post #17

thfuran wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the purpose of such a class? If the point is to show that rolling your own security is bad, it seems like having an inside man would just help leave people convinced that they could have succeeded if only it weren't for that other guy.

Something tells me a conspirator wouldn't be required anyways. Your security is either sound or broken, i.e. probably broken unless you use proven implementations of proven cryptosystems with proven configurations. E.g. even if RSA is (currenly) safe, as well as its primitives and common configuration... rolling your own implementation will probably be subject to timing attacks.

Post by meadori » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 4:10 PM UTC

lvh wrote: post #112

PeterisP wrote: post #107

The old Cryptopals challenges ( http://cryptopals.com/ ) seem to cover the same material in a pedagogically very different way - they don't feed you the information as this book does, but give you a practical task which can be easily done with e.g. reading the specification of an algorithm from wikipedia, but figuring out the implementation of the attack yourself gives a much better understanding than simply reading…

Hi! I'm the author. Also a big fan of Cryptopals; I was one of the reviewers for Set 8, and working with some of the authors. It's interesting to hear that point of view; because I thought C101 took the same approach as Cryptopals in the sense that it focused on teaching crypto by breaking it. When I say "learn by doing", I'm referring to stuff like walking through a bit-flipping attack just like cryptopals does. I r…

  > The exercises accompanying this book focus on teaching cryptography by breaking inferior systems.

Post by cponeill » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 5:32 PM UTC

Natanael_L wrote: post #128

cponeill wrote: post #101

I downloaded this about a year ago and loved it. Incredibly informative. Is this an updated version?

It gets continuously updated, so yes.