Reddit reviews Cryptography: Theory and Practice, Third Edition (Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications)

Stinson; Cryptography: Theory and Practice is my preferred crypto book. Very math heavy, as opposed to a lot of crypto resources i see that are hand-wavy.

Any in-depth discussion of cryptography is going to be heavy on discrete math. I took an undergraduate course using this book, which seemed to offer a pretty gentle introduction to the mathy bits (based on simpler ciphers) before diving into modern crypto.

I haven't personally dealt with Bruce Schneier's book, but it looks like a solid resource. It does seem to assume a fair amount of programming background though.

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In any case, I'd recommend picking up a book on crypto, and be prepared to deal with a certain amount of math. In particular, modular arithmetic and certain subsets of probability are heavily used.

When I took the class in college, we went off Stinson's Cryptography: Theory and Practice and I got a lot out of that.

I also really enjoyed Disappearing Cryptography, which is actually about steganography and watermarking.

Last term, on a whim I took an elective math course called "Introduction to Number Theory and Cryptography". The crypto didn't come til the end, but by then, with such an extensive background in number theory, it was easy, intuitive, and I understood.
We used Elementary Number Theory which I just realized is written by Kenneth Rosen (Discrete Math and it's applications). The book was great, and by the later chapters, Crypto wasn't just a list of algorithms, and oh good, they work- I actually understood it, I grokked it.

This term, I have a mandatory course in Crypto run by the CS department. It's just "here is the algorithm" over and over, with only a bit of background math proving things. We're using Cryptography: Theory and Practice, which has a lot of algorithms, and descriptions, but doesn't necessarily provide the rigorous math proofs I prefer.

I really liked Cryptography: Theory of Practice. It's like reading a math book with useful real world examples. :)

The book is not so programming related but really, cryptography is pretty much just applied discreet math. Most of the exercises require programming but it's fairly trivial.
In my opinion the hard part isn't the programming; it's understanding the math behind.

Good luck finding what you're looking for.

As you say: Having an M.Sc in Crypto may provide a good foundation, but what, if any, specialist qualification or knowledge it provides is questionable.

The biggest personal milestones have been reading Stinson's work, and being able to understand and synthesize results on my own within that body of work. For example, with FHE, being able to port some of the claims into CUDA.

That said, it'd be interesting if there were ways to attest to the knowledge and practice of individuals on the subject. Right now it seems almost purely reputation based.

I really love 'Cryptography: Theory and Practice (3rd)' by Douglas Stinson. For me, this is one of the best introduction to the mathematical part of the cryptography.