Welcome

Dear reader,

Getting into cryptography is a road paved with difficult challenges and many uncertainties about what there is to learn, or what’s important to know. “What’s the quickest path to get there?” you may have often asked yourself. And you were right to wonder. The amount of information out there can be intimidating, especially when most of it is outdated or goes deeply into theoretical rabbit holes.

Fear not, you’ve come to the right place. This book is here for you, the curious, the student, the engineer who wants to know (or needs to know) more about cryptography.

In this book, I first summarize the state of real world cryptography, which is the cryptography that is used every day by you and me, as well as the large companies of this world. Almost everything you learn in this book is practical and useful.

The rest of the book looks into what the real world cryptography of tomorrow is starting to look like. Many topics like cryptocurrencies and post-quantum cryptography are often ignored from the applied cryptography literature, but they are equally as important. The field of applied cryptography is currently booming and changing rapidly, and one has to keep up with its advances or fear being left out behind.