Reddit reviews Introduction to Modern Cryptography: Principles and Protocols (Chapman & Hall/CRC Cryptography and Network Security Series)

I'm a PhD student. My day typically involves some of the following:

1. Reading old and new research papers related to my work.
   
   Some of the reading I do is work by my advisor (whose model I'm using in my own work) or people in the field that we're working to solve the same or similar problems. Sometimes it will be related work that I will need to cite in my own papers that I need to understand. Sometimes it will be about cryptographic primitives that I want to make use of in one of my own papers. Sometimes I will read about works that I want to extend, including their "Future Work" section to figure out what the unsolved problems in the area are. Reading can also involve printing out a paper and keeping notes on it or running some small examples by hand to see if things make sense. For example, I'm currently reading the SmartPool paper and re-reading the Ouroboros paper for the n-th time.
   
   
2. Writing my own papers.
   
   I'm currently working on three papers. These are nice examples, because each of them is in a different stage: The first one is finished and I'm polishing it; the second one has been accepted at a major conference, but still needs some work; the third one is in exploratory and at very early stage.
   
   My Non-Interactive Proofs of Proof-of-Work paper is in quite mature stage and has a dozen citations now. Some people have followed up on this paper and have given me extensive feedback, which I want to incorporate and use to improve the paper. I will go over their feedback and make small fixes, check my math again, and so on. Someone made a lecture on my work on YouTube which I would go through to see how they educate people about my work and to see if my writing is as clear as I would like it to be. This paper hasn't been published in a formal venue yet, so I'm also waiting for a response and refreshing my email these days, as it's the time the responses from a conference I've submitted it to come out.
   
   A second paper I'm working on is called "Proof-of-Stake Sidechains". This has not yet been made public, but it has been accepted in a major conference. I'm being urged by my advisor and co-authors to keep working on it so that we can put it up on ePrint very soon. This work involves reading footnotes and comments scribbled on the paper by my co-authors which scrutinize my security proof and basically point out mathematical mistakes in my thinking. As the conference version contains proof sketches, but the open-access version will contain fully formal proofs, most of the work is in the formalism and the precise mathematics. My work involves re-structuring my lemmas by, for instance, splitting them up, merging them, changing their assumptions, or changing their statements. Sometimes I will look at a proof portion and realize there's a mistake and try to fix it. Or the proof will be correct, but the writing will be too unclear and I will try to make it a bit more readable or verbose. I'm also working a lot on making my algorithms (pseudocode) clearer by changing some of my notation, making them shorter, ensuring my variable names are good, and so on. Some of my work here also includes formatting the paper to look better in LaTeX, adding explanatory paragraphs in the text where I feel things are not clear, and sometimes changing the narrative and doing "editorial" work on the text, such as moving sections around or splitting up a section or so.
   
   A third paper I'm working on will probably be called something along the lines of "Blockchain Moustaches: Adversarially censoring block predicates", but I'm not sure yet. In this work, we don't know much yet, but we're trying to figure things out. We have a few theorem sketches which we think are true, but we're not sure. I'm trying to create proof sketches there. I will run some examples on my notebook and maybe make some proof attempt in a specific direction. Some other work I'm doing here is thinking about relevant applications of what we're doing and considering whether our work can be applied in areas where we haven't thought of yet. This work consists of googling about topics and trying to figure out how various practical systems work, including reading some code. Also, if I have an idea but I'm unable to approach it in theory, I will write code to run simulations in which I can confirm my hypotheses. For example, I will implement an attack and see if it works with some probability and calculate it using a Monte Carlo approach. Or I will make a prototype implementation of one of my new schemes to measure how fast it is, how many bytes it takes up (e.g. a new signature scheme), or how many bytes it requires on the network (e.g. for a new cryptographic protocol that runs on the network).
   
   In practice, this means that I'm spending most of my time either on my notebook or in front of my computer writing LaTeX in Atom and committing in git/github.
   
   
3. Reading books and doing coursework. As part of my PhD, I'm currently required to take a few master courses. This semester, I'm taking a course on Computational Complexity and another one on Axiomatic Set Theory. Work here is what a typical master student will do. Read the book, attend the lectures, solve exercises, take exams, and so on. Sometimes I will also read a chapter from a book more closely related to cryptography, e.g. Katz's "Introduction to Modern Cryptography".
   
   
4. Meetings. I will typically have a couple of meetings every day, most of which take place via video conferencing.
   
   My meetings will be with my advisor or my co-authors, in which we will go over some section of our paper where some thing is unclear. As I'm the student here, typically I will present some of my progress and ask questions to help me find my way. Another thing I will do is I will explain a portion of my proof to my co-authors and they will confirm that I'm in the right direction or they may have some insightful comment about something that I'm missing.
   
   I'm also working with some master students to supervise their master theses and I have some meetings with them also. Here I will hear about their progress and give them general direction. I'm currently working with a student who is implementing one of my papers in practice. We will often discuss a section of my paper and clarify something in my pseudocode, or look at his code and see if it makes sense. Sometimes he will ask me questions about the security of my scheme or why I'm doing things the way I'm doing them in theory and if he needs to include certain checks in practice. Perhaps we will work through an example on a whiteboard to illustrate why a certain attack is possible if some aspect of the construction is incorrectly implemented.
   
   I'm also working with IOHK, a company with an engineering team who are implementing some of my schemes in production. I'll have a meeting with them every once in a while, in which their engineers will ask me questions about my scheme and they will gauge my reaction about what they're doing. They'll present their work and we will discuss if it's in the right direction. Sometimes they will make simplifying assumptions in the code and we'll talk about whether they make sense security-wise. Sometimes they will give me insight about how things are different in practice and about something that I have missed in one of my papers and inspire me to write an additional section or change something. Here they also sometimes point out related work which I'll put in my backlog for later reading.
   
   
5. Teaching. Sometimes I'm a Teaching Assistant in certain courses. I'm not doing it this semester, but we're planning for a couple of courses next semester (a graduate course on "Introduction to Cryptography" and another one for "Introduction to Blockchains"). If I'm actively helping, like I will do next semester, this can involve teaching for a couple of hours in the amphitheater, answering student questions, preparing exam questions, correcting exercises submitted by students, preparing slides for my next presentation, or creating new exercises that people will solve. Exercises can be theoretical or practical, and in the case of practical exercises I may have to write some code to automatically check students' solutions (which are also in the form of code).
   
   
6. Conference participation. I'm spending these couple of months in my lab in Athens, but more often than not I will be traveling and attending conferences. I will attend talks where people present their work, or sometimes I'll give a talk about my work to an audience and take their questions. If I'm giving a talk, some of my work involves preparing slides or notes, rehearsing, and doing a trial in front of my colleagues at the lab. In some conferences that are less academic and more practical, we will try to make some of the work we do more accessible and collaborate with produces to create YouTube videos about our work that can be viewed by a broader audience.
   
   I guess that sums up most of my days! If you have further questions feel free to reach out :)

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).
  
  

Not only are you misinformed but you refuse to acknowledge the works for prominent cryptographers. In the case you're actually willing to understand why you're wrong about pretty much everything, I encourage you to read: this and this and this. Or better yet, you can skip all of the above and just read this.

I'm a math guy and fairly new to the subject, but I'm loving this book and see it recommended quite often:

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Cryptography-Principles-Protocols/dp/1584885513

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Cryptography-Principles-Protocols/dp/1584885513 is what I used in class. It goes deep. It may not be super easy to understand if you just jump around, as it has a lot of proofs and the book builds upon existing information as you go. But if you hammer concepts into your head and don't move on until you understand why things are the way the way they are explained, then you will be very, very competent at the subject.

this book is good to get a grasp of modern yet "established" crypto

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Cryptography-Principles-Protocols/dp/1584885513

Katz and Lindell is the undergrad gold standard on intro cryptography. Goldreich is a good graduate-level intro if Katz and Lindell is too basic. Goldreich also has a second volume.

Most modern ciphers don't really use math in the same way as the day of old (at least when you're talking about private key encryption) and the math of public key encryption (at least for starters) is pretty basic. Some elementary number theory concepts which you've likely learned in discrete math should be enough to understand a treatment of RSA that doesn't spend too much time talking about abstract algebra.

In terms of a way forward a lot of this depends on what stuff you really want to do. Designing new crypto is extremely tough and is heavily scrutinized and implementing it is no different. If you want to honestly try and design something usable you definitely need a background in theoretical crypto and I highly recommend the book Introduction to Modern Cryptography. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Cryptography-Principles-Protocols/dp/1584885513 There's a newer edition but I can't speak to the differences. This book is an excellent read for anyone interested in the art of Cryptographic proof.

If you are interested in the more implementation/security route of things taking a course on Computer Security is helpful although I'm not sure if this is what you're really interested in. I personaly was much more into pure Crypto until I started studying actual Security concepts and now I love both. There's something super satisfying about understanding buffer overflows and pretty much everything else in security enough to actually execute an attack. DISCLAIMER Don't attack a system you don't have permission to attack. It's illegal, you will get caught, and it won't be worth it. If you want to practice actual hacking in a legal way look into OWASP.

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.

Not light reading (it is proof based), but Introduction to Modern Cryptography is a good undergraduate book on the subject.