“How Do I Get Into Cryptography?”
“How Do I Get Into Cryptography?”
Almost every day I get asked the question,
“How Do I Get Into Cryptography”
and my answer is always the same:
“Go and find something you are interested in, and dive in and learn it. It might be hashing methods, symmetric key encryption or public key encryption.”
I appreciate that those who ask are looking for a major bullet point for their learning and to point to a Wikipedia page which contains everything you need to know about cryptography, or “Learn Cryptography In A Day”, or a ChatGPT hack of, “Tell Me Everything about Cryptography”. It doesn’t exist.
Cryptography is a vast subject, and most will enter by simply applying its basic techniques and without knowing any of the context or theory behind the methods. It is an extensively practical subject and also highly theoretical. You can’t learn it by simply reading a book, as that book would have more than 100,000 pages.
It is learned over years and decades. It changes by the day. It is an infinite learning route. It is a sinner (hiding bad people) and a saint (protecting good people). It is never perfection and always flawed in some way — and I love it!
To me, the route is from learning the basics of the core methods of hashing, symmetric key, asymmetric key, digital certificates, and so on, and then reading back about the theory of Galious Fields (GF), prime number theory, discrete logs, and lattice methods, and then the subject really comes alive. But, along the way, you must learn how to use it properly, so don’t miss an opportunity to learn a method without implementing it in code.
But, that’s not the end of it. At its core is the peer review process, where advancements happen every single day and where the foundation of the cybersecurity industry has been based on classic papers. In fact, you struggle sometimes to keep on top of this, but eventually develop skills in spotting great new work, and when you have time to go back and read the classic papers. Eventually, you do develop the skill to be able to read fairly advanced research papers and make sense of them.
And, for the people and its history. That is just as interesting as the maths. From Horst Fiestel at IBM to Whit Diffie and Marty Hellman laying down a concrete foundation, and then onto Rivest, Shamir and Adelman finding a trap door function — it is full of excitement, amazing advancements in knowledge and intrigue. It is built on the greatness of people and not of large and faceless companies.
So, don’t become a slave to the machine, and become so lacking in knowledge that you have to ask ChatGPT for your knowlege, go learn with some depth, and feed the most special computing engine on the planet — your brain. And, so, specially for you, I’ve compiled a list of topics, Go learn crypto: