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What is the deal with Practical Cryptography versus Cryptography Engineering? I have frequently seen people say they are the "same book." How similar are they?
by dfc 13y ago
What 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.