Modern Cryptography: Theory and Practice

Cryptography has been around for a long time but a solid introductory crypto book is hard to find. This is one of the best crypto book I have ever bought. Well worth the investment and I am sure it is a book that I can always go back to if I need to look up something. It has a nice number theory chapter but I wish it could be more in depth(provides more proofs). The chapters on public-key crypto and related crypto.techniques are very well written. This book also covers some nice research result one can only found on some research papers(if one cares to dig). I am very impressed with this book! Not too "dry" nor too "elementary!"

This is an excellent guide to the state of the art of modern cyptography. Its unique style will benefit a very wide audience: security practitioners are given an insight into cryptographic theory while theoreticians can learn valuable lessons about what goes on in practice.In the early chapters excellent examples are given to motivate security considerations that feature later. Also, the necessary mathematical background is provided in a very accessible manner.The book covers many of the latest important developments in cryptography including the Advanced Encryption Standard, identity -based encryption and provable security.

Modern Cryptography is by far the best first text on cryptography I've ever seen, blowing books like Applied Cryptography out of the water. It's a clear treatment that focuses on building practical systems, focusing on how to avoid common pitfalls. The focus of this book is the correct design of cryptographic protocols that resist attack. This is in contrast to books like Applied Cryptography, which focuses on the tools and the building blocks used to construct systems, glossing over how to use those things together to build strong systems. While the innards of block ciphers and so on can be interesting, Schneier himself is prone to saying something along the lines of, "The world is filled with insecure systems built by people who read Applied Cryptography". That is, in order to build secure systems with cryptography, one should understand how to use cryptographic tools properly. We do not need to know how the tools themselves work... we can take it for granted as long as we understand their behavior.It must be said that the average person shouldn't be designing their own cryptographic protocols, either. One of the things this book does well is demonstrate the large number of non-intuitive ways in which cryptographic protocols can go wrong. For example, the chapters on authentication schemes demonstrate a large number of schemes authored by reputable cryptographers that turned out to have significant weaknesses.For the above reason, this probably isn't a text that needs to be on everybody's desk. I would say it is essential for anyone who wants to understand why protocol design is so hard, and it is also valuable to the few people who will go on to build new protocols, particularly graduate students in cryptography.Here's what I like about the book:- Cryptography is a rapidly evolving field, and this book is quite up to date, covering AES and other recent protocols. This is quite in contrast to books like Applied Cryptography, which is painfully out of date.- The text is pretty lucid, staying away from arcane mathematical symbols when possible, and explaining them well when not. While it's a bit more math-y and not quite as fun to read as Applied Cryptography, it is nearly as good in this respect, and the content is far better.- It's the first book I've seen to do a good job covering the state of the art in provable security techniques. It introduces fairly recent provable security models, and does so in a way that it doesn't take a mathematician to understand.- Its coverage of topics is great, particularly in that it spends much time examining real-world protocols such as SSL/TLS, SSH and Kerberos.If you are in the target audience for this book, you won't regret buying it. Even at the $54.99 list price (which is what I paid, sadly), you shouldn't feel even remotely cheated, particularly considering the fact that there are shorter books with only a fraction of the content that cost a lot more.

An excellent book on crypto, concentrating more on the principle behind the modern crypto than just description of the algorithms. Many recent results are included. I would encourage all my PhD students to have it.

If you are a cryptography/security student, developer, architect or researcher, you'll find Modern Cryptography very useful. It's a self-contained book describing the mathematical foundation of crypto algorithms/protocols, their textbook versions, their real-world versions, their analysis and real-world attacks. It's difficult to find useful modern cryptographic techniques (e.g. OAEP, ID-based crypto, ZK proofs) not described in the book!The author really illustrates the difficulty of designing cryptographic protocols. The numerous attack and fix iterations on different protocols showing the subtleties in designing such protocols are very interesting. It's good to have such an analysis in one book instead of 25 research papers.The book is well written and clear. The item are presented in depth, with many examples. Many parts of the book require a strong mathematical background, but if you can follow the cryptographic literature, you'll be able to understand the author explanations.