Any interesting books about cryptography?

Question

My friend is interested in math and cryptography. He has even dove into the internals of AES and SHA256 and tried to implement it himself. His birthday's very soon and I wonder if there are any interesting reads out there suitable for him.I'm not too sure what specific field of cryptography he's particularly interested in, but I do know that he likes clever algorithms that make sense when you think about it.

ivanr · Accepted Answer

I've been buying lots of cryptography books lately as I wanted to learn about the evolution of our understanding of this topic.
How about some of the following:
- "Real-World Cryptography" is my recommendation for the first book to read, but probably won't work for your friend as it doesn't cover any algorithms in detail. It's a great topic to cover a lot of ground quickly to gain a good understanding of how cryptography is used in practice.
- "Introduction to Modern Cryptography" is used as a textbook on many universities and I recommend it for someone who doesn't mind diving in into the maths. Being a textbook, it's fairly academic.
- "The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-breaking" covers the history.
- For TLS and PKI, read "Bulletproof TLS and PKI" (disclaimer: I wrote it). It's a good book to understand practical protocol engineering in the context of the evolution of TLS from 1995 until now.
Edits:
- The manga book is very nice and fun, but high level and dated.
- Crypto by Steven Levy also recommended.
- Serious Cryptography is good, but Real-World Cryptography is more recent and provides a better foundation.
- Cryptography Engineering / Practical Cryptography / Applied Cryptography are often recommended, but they're very dated at this point.
- Your friend might enjoy https://cryptopals.com/

tapeloop · Answer

Crypto by Steven Levy is a great overview of the history of modern cryptography, but Serious Cryptography by JP Aumasson is an excellent technical place to start - if he's interested in coding things up it has a lot of useful examples and walkthroughs

pjmorris · Answer

How about 'The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet', Kahn. It isn't directly technical but it is the classic history of the field.

webmaven · Answer

The Code Book by Simon Singh:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Code_Book

ecesena · Answer

For implementation this is a bible: Handbook of Elliptic and Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography.
Note that there’s a big math gap between AES and, eg, implementing ed25519. But if he likes this stuff, HEHCC will be a new joy every day.
You can also find the pdf online, since it’s pretty expensive and you want to make a gift, maybe you can get the Singh and throw this pdf in as a bonus challenge :)

ManlyBread · Answer

The Manga Guide to Cryptographyhttps://www.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Cryptography-Guides/dp/15...

subtra3t · Answer

Crypto 101 is pretty good but you may consider it basic.

Any interesting books about cryptography?

Crypto by Steven Levy is a great overview of the history of modern cryptography, but Serious Cryptography by JP Aumasson is an excellent technical place to start - if he's interested in coding things up it has a lot of useful examples and walkthroughs

How about 'The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet', Kahn. It isn't directly technical but it is the classic history of the field.

The Code Book by Simon Singh:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Code_Book

The Manga Guide to Cryptography
https://www.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Cryptography-Guides/dp/15...

Crypto 101 is pretty good but you may consider it basic.