Security, Hacking, Cryptography Reading? [closed]

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3380158

  •  06-10-2020
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Question

I'm very interested in learning about cryptography, steganography, and similar practices.

What books, resources, would you guys recommend in this area?

Was it helpful?

Solution

seminal crypto book http://www.schneier.com/book-applied.html

OTHER TIPS

This book is very nice and gives you a general idea about cryptography and as far as I remember some it gives also some information about steganography (from the ancient times): The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography although not an academic book.

For steganography you could check also the following two: Disappearing Cryptography, Third Edition: Information Hiding: Steganography & Watermarking or Digital Watermarking and Steganography: Fundamentals and Techniques. As you are a Java developer you may also want to take a look at the Digital Invisible Ink Toolkit.

If you want to go deep into Cryptography (for example RSA algorithm) you should read math books about number theory, abstract algebra (for an introduction to these you can check this: A Primer on Algebra and Number Theory for Computer Scientists (it's a pdf file)). Or if you want to go much deeper you should read about elliptic curve cryptography.

About hacking you may want to take a look at this one: Hacking: The Art of Exploitation.

This book The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security is also nice to read in order to learn social engineering techniques.

For learning hacking, i would suggest The art of Exploitation by John Ericson, Grey Hat hacking, Network Security and cryptography by William Stalling and even better playing online wargames (security challanges). Good luck

In addition to the Schneier book already mentioned, I recommend Beginning Cryptography With Java.

I would suggest, in order to integrate your books with a different media, this online course: https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto It's very well done, it offers both theoretical and practical sessions.

The Coursera crypto course is a good introduction to cryptography. As far as practical resources go I would suggest:

  • Over the wire - practical security challenges from basic configuration issues to exploit dev.
  • SmashTheStack - lots more practical security challenges.
  • Corelan tutorials - tutorials on exploit development
  • DEF CON - Defcon is a famous security conference that also has a reasonable reading list and a lot of videos from their conferences.

In my development experience I have found it useful to have a go at some of these things to really improve my secure software development. There are also capture the flag events that are events designed to educate and test security knowledge and deep knowledge of systems. Some of them include:

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