Mentions

This is a really well presented book, and probably has some of the clearest explanations of game-based security in this entire list. I think a lot of that clarity is owed to the use of state separable proofs, which would honestly make many areas of Cryptography a lot clearer if people used them more. I’d recommend this book even to more accomplished Cryptographers, just as a good introduction to the proof technique.

In terms of the content, this book goes over a lot of topics in symmetric Cryptography, along with a handful of topics in public key Cryptography, with the focus being on proving the security of schemes.

This focus on proofs makes the content on symmetric Cryptography markedly different from the other books I’ve mentioned so far. The focus is more so on proving that you can build large secure constructions, like authenticated encryption, from small assumptions, like pseudo-random functions.

One downside of this book is that there’s not a lot of material on public key Cryptography. I wish there were more material here, because there would be tons of interesting things to cover, even if only focusing on the provable security aspect of composing constructions.

I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who hasn’t read it, especially people who know about Cryptography, but haven’t heard much about state separable proofs yet.