Reddit reviews A Course in Number Theory and Cryptography (Graduate Texts in Mathematics)

Koblitz is a real red, it's kind of funny. His Course in Number Theory and Cryptography has this dedication:

>This book is dedicated to the memory of the students of Vietnam, Nicaragua, and El Salvador who lost their lives in the struggle against U.S. aggression. The author's royalties from sales of the book will be used to buy mathematics and science books for the universities and institutes of those three countries.

That book is probably what you want. It looks like it focuses more on math and how it applies to cryptography rather than on crypto algorithms and how they work, pros/cons, etc. It was also used in this math class at Berkeley (lots of extra reading material on that page too).

Again, I think the book you found is what you want. But here are some other options if you want some:

• You may like A Course in Number Theory and Cryptography. A bit old, but still relevant.
  
  
• Intro to Modern Cryptography is what is used at my university and various others for an undergrad crypto course. Pretty rigorous.
  
  
• I doubt you'll want this, but Applied Cryptography is the seminal text on the subject. Most anything you could want to know about crypto is going to be in here (though it could use an update).
  
  

Yep the above book is great. Other good books that are more towards the math side:

guide to elliptic curve cryptography by menenzes

a course in number theory and cryptography

If you have sufficient background in number theory, Koblitz's book is excellent. It's accessible to a strong undergraduate.

Oi. Disclaimer: I haven't bought a book in the field in a while, so there might be some new greats that I'm not familiar with. Also, I'm old and have no memory, so I may very well have forgotten some greats. But here is what I can recommend.

I got my start with Koblitz's Course in Number Theory and Cryptography and Schneier's Applied Cryptography. Schneier's is a bit basic, outdated, and erroneous in spots, and the guy is annoying as fuck, but it's still a pretty darned good intro to the field.

If you're strong at math (and computation and complexity theory) then Oded Goldreich's Foundations of Cryptography Volume 1 and Volume 2 are outstanding. If you're not so strong in those areas, you may want to come up to speed with the help of Sipser and Moret first.

Also, if you need to shore up your number theory and algebra, Victor Shoup is the man.

At this point, you ought to have a pretty good base for building on by reading research papers.

One other note, two books that I've not looked at but are written by people I really respect Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Katz and Lindell and Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach by Arora and Barak.

Hope that helps.

https://www.amazon.com/Course-Number-Cryptography-Graduate-Mathematics/dp/0387942939