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This list is intended to be an introduction to the cryptographic literature. It has been categorized to help readers distinguish amongst the books on offer along several dimensions. Note carefully that the placement of the entries and the annotations for each are intended to winnow the cryptographic wheat from the unreliable chaff. See Talk:Books on cryptography for discussion on this. Contributers are asked to take that intent into account when editing or adding entries.
Now that there is a separate page for crypto books, I suggest the following groupings, or something similar. The reasons are given below. In no particular order, then:
heavily techical material -- eg, Handbook of Applied Cryptography, Stinson's Crypto Theory and Practice, etc
meta crytography (about the uses and context of crypto security) -- Schneier's Secrets and Lies, Anderson's Security Engineering,
technical material accessible to a non-specialist audience -- Schneier's, Applied Cryptography, Practical Cryptography, Simpson's O'Reilly book on PGP,
intro material (non historical) -- eg, Gaines Cryptanalysis, Ley's Crypto book, Gardiner's crypto book
intro material (historical) -- Kahn's The Codebreakers, Budianski's Battle of Wits, Sebag-Montefiore's Enigma, ...
legendary or mythical (ie, not to be relied upon)
historical with a strong admixture of crypto info -- eg,
I also strongly suggest that each entry include evaluatory notes. I suggest that all such notes include an evaluation of technical accuracy, historical accuracy, errors found (at least qualitatively, eg. "sloppily edited lots of minor errors in examples", or "very well no significant errors found"), and currency at the time of the review. As preliminary and raw examples, the following
--Budianski's Battle of Wits is historically accurate (extensive research in recent material some of it newly available), technically accurate, and has little to do with current cryptographic practice. I, at least, found very little in the way of errors.
--Stinnet's Day of Deceit, is historically accurate as to the raw facts (the bibliography/notes is extensive), technically incompetent cryptographically, and not current at all except in a political polemic sense. Stinnet does not understand the crypto he is writing about, gets it wrong often, does not understand the tentative contingent quality of intelligence evaluation, has a political agenda (frankly avowed in the book itself) which leads him regularly astray, and his conclusions are thus unreliable.
--As well, I would include Farago's stuff in the historical with a strong admixture category, but would note that there is much legend/myth/disinformation included and that any specific claim must be evaluated with care. And so also with Toland's Day of Infamy, noting some of his informants have publicly identified themselves and disclaimed his account of their experience.
The reason for all this is, of course, that much of the material on cryptography and cryptographic history is of dubious quality. WP readers deserve a guide into the quicksand, lest they be dragged under into the mire. This is, even when responsibly covered, not stuff that is easily vetted for plausibility by the little informed, and even the well informed can be easily led down the garden path as to historical issues.
Comments?
ww
Matt,
We just collided in a big way. I'm not sure how much of the work I had in progress was lost and how much got in. I'm gearing up, after much reluctance to DO this article, having procrastinated for some time, and it will be in a state of flux until I run out of steam.
ww 19:01, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Matt, I think I've got the majority of the debris cleaned up now. I like most of your edits -- I would/should/might have seen them (or most of them, anyway) eventually. As for the purpose of the sentence about mechanization etc you deleted, they were there for 1) narrative flow and 2) to explain why there was a long blackout on public crypto literature. During that period I'm aware of no intellectually serious books on crypto in English; it was all kiddie stuff. Now this may betray more the lacunae in my coverage of the published field for 50 years, but ... Anyway, our reader deserves to have this said, for it's a sort of ground thing which is easy to miss.
Acceptable?
ww 19:54, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Matt, I'm lost. A 'long term meta note is better'? Not sure where you're headed with that. ww 17:18, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I added a "Fiction" section (hope you don't mind), and started it off with Cryptonomicon. I realize the rest of the books listed here are technical non-fiction books regarding the subject, but since this is the list of books on cryptography, it seemed the place to list works of fiction that focus on the subject. Thoughts? - Eisnel 17:13, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Just some notes on historic works.
--Imran 23:18, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Wiki johng (talk) 18:12, 11 December 2007 (UTC) A note about the citation of Nigel Smart's "Cryptography, An Introduction". In this reference, there is also a link to a Wiki article, obviously meant to be the author, but the Nigel Smart in this link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Smart) is an Australian athlete, not the Nigel Smart who wrote the book. That Nigel Smart would be better served by linking to or at least summarizing the information at "Nigel Smart's Home Page" (http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~nigel/). I am new to the idea of making contributions to Wiki. I did look at the "source" for the page, and can see that Wiki links are indicated with doubled square brackets, but I can't quite figure out the best way to fix this. Just thought I would bring it to your attention. I'll continue to investigate the proper way to make the correction; for example, is it appropriate to link to the author's (that is, Prof. Smart's) home page? Does one ask for permission? Anyway, this is the nature of the problem. Any advice would be appreciated. Regards...[reply]
This, despite the tempting, though superficial, paradox that secrecy is of the essence in sending confidential messages — see Kerckhoffs' law.
What does it mean? I have no idea :-) Doesn't seem to be a well formed sentence anyway. Can anyone clear this up? Ambush Commander 20:57, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)
I make it out to be something like this: If your goal is be secret about what you're doing, the first impulse is to not tell people how you're keeping whatever it is secret. After long and painful experience, the crypto community (a bit of reification there until perhaps the last 25 or 30 years, as there were only practicioners in small bunches here and there employed mostly by governments, plus a few amateurs (Poe perhaps most famous amongst them) and some very optimistic commercial equipment makers; starting with the Diffie-Hellman public discovery of asymmetric crytography ca '76 it all changed and something like a real community emerged ith journals and conferences and ...) came to the realization that the Enemy knowing how you did it wasn't the real issue as a practical matter. Kerckhoff in the 1870s and 75 years later, Shannon, both wrapped this realization into pithy epigrams.
Hope that helps... ww 21:54, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I removed Enigma from the fiction list since there was no description, and I sort of remember reading it but only vaguely, i.e. I now find it un-memorable. This is the one that was partly set at Bletchley Park, right? IIRC, it used the codebreaking operation as a backdrop but was otherwise just another random suspense/romance novel that didn't have any actual significant cryptographic content. Cryptonomicon at least had the Solitaire cipher figure into the plot. Feel free to put Enigma back, but a blurb would be appreciated. Phr (talk) 22:24, 23 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've put Harris' Enigma on the list, not aware of the recent discussion in this place (didn't scroll down all the way, sorry). It was not my intention to create an edit war, so anyone should feel free to remove it again. Still I believe this book deserves a place somewhere in Wikipedia; a short motivation for this is on my talk page. Jaho 02:15, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
As I recall, the HoAC is on an undergraduate level. It certainly assumes some familiarity with mathematical symbols, although it has a refresher section.
Number Theory and Cryptography by Koblitz is pretty good. 3 of the chapters are elementary, but other parts appear to be grad level. And Algebraic Aspects of Cryptography by Koblitz, which I am not familiar with.66.217.165.131 03:05, 4 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Some lists of books have been added to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion. You can find the discussions here. RockMagnetist (talk) 22:23, 5 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
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I was looking at Lists of books, and I think a more consistent title for this list would be List of books about cryptography. Any opposition to a move? BenKuykendall (talk) 09:00, 19 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Practical Cryptography. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. LFaraone 13:51, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
