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Old, but still relevant.

This book is directed at people who implement crypto. It's more for engineers than for academics.
Most of us should know better than to make our own implementations of crypto algorithms. Today, it makes more sense to use tried-and-true libraries than to reinvent the wheel. I wouldn't use the book for its original purpose, but I still find it quite relevant to understand the basic concepts (and some history).

It is highly dated. In 1996, the world was different. DES was still quite used, and the Clipper Chip was a current threat. Nobody talked about AES/Rijndael, and MD5 was already suspected to be insecure, though not yet as blatantly as today.

This is not a good reference on how to do crypto in 2017. This is a good reference on what crypto is, what the basic concepts are about, and how they work.

Buy this book if you are entering the world of crypto and want to have a holistic view of what it is about (symmetric/public-key cryptography; hashes; MACs; secret sharing, digital certificates, even digital cash.....). Do not buy this book if you need to learn current-day algorithms like AES or SHA-2 (SHA-1 is included, and considered secure back then).

I found the book still worth my time and money. I'm now looking for similar, but updated books, and for the mathematical aspects of cryptography, I recommend Dan Boneh's (incredibly difficult) cryptography course in Coursera. All together, they are hard to beat. Do not focus all your energy on this book - but don't disregard it either.Read full review

Verified purchase:  Yes • Condition: pre-owned • Sold by: betterworldbooks

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Verified purchase:  Yes • Condition: pre-owned • Sold by: thrift.books

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