| I'm in that boat. I'm watching all of Christoph Paar's cryptography lecture series on YouTube -- it was recorded in 2010, so I do wonder if it's missing any new state of the art / best practises. I'm like 18 lectures in, two out of three semesters. And I still feel like I have only the vaguest ideas what the primitives are, how they work, what they're for, and their weaknesses. I'm having to follow all the mathematics as someone not mathematically inclined (Prof Paar did do a good job of making the mathematics fairly accessible though). All of this so I can have a bit more confidence in proposing E2E for a project at some point in future (before somebody asks us to, too late). And my use-case makes it difficult to follow the most trodden paths so I can't just plug in a handshake protocol and MACs and elliptic curves or "just use PGP" or whatever. As a software dev, I have all these boxes I could use, that come with so many caveats "if you do this, but don't do this, no do that, don't do that"... It's very tricky trying to work out how to glue the pieces together without already being in the field of crypto. Feels like I'll always be missing some crucial piece of information I'd get if I pored over hundreds of textbooks and papers but I don't have the resources to do so! I'd love if someone did like, a plain English recipe book for cryptography! Give the mathematical proof of stuff, but also explain the strengths/weaknesses/possible attacks to laypeople without the prerequisite that you need to understand ring modulus or Galois fields or whatever first. Or, like, flowcharts to follow! |
https://nostarch.com/serious-cryptography-2nd-edition should have the latest info, it's approachable and goes into pitfalls. https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography is another.
>As a software dev, I have all these boxes I could use, that come with so many caveats "if you do this, but don't do this, no do that, don't do that"... It's very tricky trying to work out how to glue the pieces together without already being in the field of crypto
Until you know more, strongly consider suggesting the company just hires someone who knows that. Just because you're available to do it, doesn't mean you should just yet.