By: Amine Amhoume
January 30, 2018
The Best Courses and E-books To Learn Cryptography for Beginners.
By: Amine Amhoume
January 30, 2018
What is Cryptography ?
Cryptography is the artistry of using codes, mathematics, and ciphers to preserve the privacy of a two-sided communication, a file, or a message, so no third-party person or organization can recognize it, this is a conventional definition of Cryptography that was being used through thousands of years before.
Why you should learn Cryptography ?
Well ! if you work in an IT job position or you are willing to pursue a career in Cybersecurity, a skill like this one will be extremely helpful for you to get a job, in that case, people with Cryptography skills in their resume have a bigger chance to be hired than those who don’t, furthermore, all the sensitive information and significant communications people share every day can be hacked at any moment, that’s why it is very important to understand how can you secure the data you might be responsible for, using ciphers and algorithms, not only this but, if you are a hacker and you have been practicing in CTF hacking challenges and wargames, you probably noticed that cryptography has prominent role in those challenges.
Is Cryptography hard to learn ?
Cryptography is no longer a difficult goal to achieve with all those available resources on the Internet, hence, in this article you will discover some important resources to fill your learning desire, starting with university-level courses through in-depth e-books and practical tutorials, you will learn how to encrypt and decrypt messages, crack passwords, as well as to break application’s security, to perform varied attacks and how to defend yourself against them. If you think this is going to be a tough experience for you, then don't worry, the resources listed below will help you in your adventure, all you need is passion and to be patient about your aim.
One more thing to add before you go, is that if you are worried about what level of math is required to learn Cryptography, then here's the answer: you will need to be familiar with discrete mathematics ( if you are not familiar with discrete mathematics here's a link to form an idea about it ), together with Algebra, and statistics and probability ( here's a link to understand them ).
Now after you gathered a general idea of what you are going to learn, it's time for you to be ready and get started using the following materials:
Khan Academy is a nonprofit organization that offers instructive courses for people who have no previous idea about Cryptography, begin with the definition of it, and through different fundamentals, Khan Academy's series of videos will make you dive through the basics of Cryptography in a well-explained way, featured with transcripts attached to the videos in order to make it easier for you to understand what is being said.
Udacity's Applied Cryptography course
Udacity is a famous website where most learners aim to learn the skills they want. Udacity Youtube's channel offers you a free course to learn Applied Cryptography, in this series of lectures, you will comprehend the basics of Cryptography and how to use it to solve computing problems and to keep your data secure, also, you can log in to their website and download the videos to watch them later beside its transcripts.
Introduction to cryptography by Dr. Christof Paar I
If you are wondering how Cryptography is being taught at the university, this university-level playlist consists of a series of classroom lectures made by Dr.Christof Paar, with this in mind, you will have an experience of studying Cryptography in a high educational ambiance, the course goes throughout various expositions, beginning with an introduction to Cryptography and Data Security through a caption of theory Symmetric and Key Establishment algorithms.
Cryptography by Professor Dan Boneh
This is another Youtube playlist presented by professor Dan Boneh that will help you understand Cryptography on one hand of information security, the goal of this course is to learn how Crypto primitives work and how to use them the proper way.
Cryptography by Professor Dan BonehThis is another Youtube playlist presented by professor Dan Boneh that will help you understand Cryptography on one hand of Information Security, the objective of this course is to learn how Crypto primitives work and how to use them the proper way.
Cryptography by Kelly Handerhan & Leo Dregier
For newbie hackers, this course explains diverse encryption and decryption attacks and tools, also, it goes into the key conceptions of Cryptography from a hacker perspective, the good thing about this one is that it contains shortened videos divided in three section, which help you save time understanding topics and principles.
Going deeper.
It is good to know that Cryptography is a huge field when it comes to creating disparate methods of securing data, thereupon, sometimes you will face some complicated expressions or theories that require a lot of time for you to get it, thus, if you find it difficult to understand a concept, then you can use the following books as reference in order to gain a clear idea of what seems complex to you.
This is a very important book for every beginner with a minimum background of calculus, it provides the essential mathematical concepts in order to understand modern cryptography, also, it introduces most Crypto algorithms used in modern-application.
Cryptography and Network Security
This book is for network administrators who want to understand the secrets of network cryptography mechanism, William stalling, the author of this book provides much practical analysis of principles. The book is well structured, not to forget that this is the Forth edition of the book which means it is updated version.
Cryptography Theory and Practice Third Edition
This edition is an update of the first and the second editions, where the author represents basic mathematical techniques used throughout the book, and illustrate all the theories of cryptography. For people who really want to go deeper in this field, this book is a good way to start.
A Handbook Of Applied Cryptography
Many professional Cryptographers use this book as a reference, it consists of many in-depth ideas about cryptography and how to use it in information security, also, this book has many advanced mathematical techniques and algorithms explained.
Challenge yourself!
For the sake of practicing what you have learned, CTFs (Capture The Flag) contests and Wargames are the best places to test your abilities, after you drill the encryption and decryption methods, you must be able to solve Cryptography challenges, keep in mind that Crypto takes a respectable part in every CTF competition, henceforth, you need to know many methodologies and tools used to crack passwords and decrypt messages, for this reason, the links listed below are some website and documentations that will help you get comfortable with CTF and wargames as well as Crypto quests in general.
If you are not familiar with CTF, this document contains a lot of thoughts that explain what CTF is and where to find them, but the most important thing is that it gives you a lot of information about how to detect ciphers and solve them in addition to tools you can use to break its security.
Because of its simplicity and clarity, Tutorialpoint is one of the best websites where you can find simple and practical cryptography courses and tutorials to follow.
LearnCryptography is a website that might help you understand different encryptions in the form of short articles.
This is a list of tools you can use while practicing crypto schemes.
A wargames website to practice.
A Simple Motivation.
Finally, you might face people who will tell you that Cryptography is something very difficult to learn, in fact, those people have no idea what crypto is, if you have a strong desire to learn cryptography, then dedicate yourself to work and stick o a plan, thanx to the Internet and its resources. good luck.
