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If I remember rightly, they actually say in Practical Cryptography that some of the worst crypto they've seen comes from people who've read Applied Cryptography
by Osmium 13y ago
If I remember rightly, they actually say in Practical Cryptography that some of the worst crypto they've seen comes from people who've read Applied Cryptography and then decided to roll their own. Which is presumably one of the dangers in writing an "accessible" cryptography textbook is that then people who read it think they understand it... (I say this as a fan of Applied Cryptography, but more as an academic text -- I'd never dream of writing crypto code myself)
- tptacek 13y agoApplied is a good _book_; it's fun and interesting to read. But people should read it as pop science.
- dfc 13y agoWhat is the deal with Practical Cryptography versus Cryptography Engineering? I have frequently seen people say they are the "same book." How similar are they? The publication date is seven years apart. Did they just add a new foreword and change the title?
- pbsd 13y agoThey are the same book; Cryptography Engineering is simply the 2nd edition, although they decided to change the title for some reason.
- tptacek 13y agoEveryone in our practice has a copy of one or the other, and the differences aren't at all significant. I'd buy whichever one you can get cheaper.
- jessaustin 13y agoThe very few changes from Practical to Engineering, summarized: * Added a co-author (Tadayoshi Kohno) * Added handy exercises for self-study (presumably the work of Kohno) * Buried the opening "Design Philosophy" chapter in the following "Context" chapter, in a more nuanced, mature form * Drops a discussion of UMAC for one of GMAC which is similar in that they both eschew the use of normal hash functions for something called a "universal" hash * Discussion of OCB and CCM modes is updated with info about CWC and GCM, since that took place in the publishing interim * Index is only a page longer, but seems more complete * Reduced from 410 pages to 353, with a font that appears slightly larger and much less LaTeX-ugly; perhaps the kerning is better too? That's all I found in 15 minutes of skimming. Note that flaws which were understandable in Practical are more glaring in Engineering: recommending XML where JSON would be better, advocating MAC-then-encrypt rather than encrypt-then-MAC, etc. I probably would not have purchased Engineering if I had realized how minor its updates were. It would be better to purchase if you don't own either book, though.