"Any course on crypto needs to address both algorithms in the abstract and the particularities of how they're implemented in the real world." I disagree. Ther

"Any course on crypto needs to address both algorithms in the abstract and the particularities of how they're implemented in the real world." I disagree. There is a rich theory of cryptography that is entirely abstract, for which the low-level details are an irrelevant distraction. Even the AES finalists, which were designed with low-level concerns in mind, are described abstractly and can be implemented at a high level (I have an implementation of Serpent in Common Lisp, for example -- no messing around with low-level details, just a functionally correct block cipher). Within the crypto research community there are people who work on high-level languages suitable for cryptography implementation: http://www.charm-crypto.com/Main.html http://www.charm-crypto.com/Main.html To be fair, there is also an enormous body of work on implementing cryptosystems in the real world -- at least enough to have an entire course dedicated to the topic. If anything, we should really have two courses: an introductory course that covers the theory of cryptography, and a cryptography engineering course that deals with real-world implementations.