Crypto
From the author who made "hacker" a household word comes a groundbreaking book about the most hotly debated subject of the digital age. Crypto concerns privacy in the information age and about the nerds and visionaries who, nearly 20 years ago, predicted that the Internet's greatest virtue--free access to information--was also its most perilous drawback: a possible end to privacy.
Stats for nerds
26recommend
37mentions
34people
2008–2024years
78% recommend22% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Steven Levy’s Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age. So far I like it.
- 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/
- For anybody who hasn't already read it, I highly recommend the book: "Crypto" by Steven Levy. I was 30% of my way through the book before I started recognizing real world events, news stories, whispered computer secrets; and realized that it wasn't a fictional book and was instead talking about real history.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/984428.Crypto?from_searc...
- The dream machine, and Steven Levy’s other books (Crypto and Facebook) are also really good.
Code by Charles Petzold is mostly not about history, but it uses a lot of computing history as part of the way it teaches.
Microserfs is fiction but captures what it feels like to work in the Bay Area imo.
- I have a tattoo of an encryption routine, partly as a protest. Unfortunately I changed it at the last minute to make it look cooler and introduced a bug.
Here's the entire proper Perl 5 code:
The buggy version is slightly shorter but I depended on an incorrect reading of some tricky wording in the docs and didn't test thoroughly enough. I'm considering turning the tattoo into a diff.undef $/;print<>$<>I recommend Crypto by Steven Levy as a high-level refresher on the events of the time. (https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?isbn=9780670859504&st=xl&...)
- Yes, export regulations were heavy back then. To have proper SSL in your Netscape, you had to import this patch file from Australia. And then we had this whole Crypto Wars thing going on. Look at Steven Levy's excellent book on the subject, or search on the Wired archives.
