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Resources

Level: reference

Where to go next, and what each one is actually good for. Every link was checked the day it was added.

Books

Book What it is for
Serious Cryptography — Jean-Philippe Aumasson The best single modern book for this library's reader: rigorous about what each primitive promises, unsentimental about implementation, and it names the failure modes. Start here
Cryptography Engineering — Ferguson, Schneier, Kohno The systems view — key management, protocol design, and why the interesting decisions are never which cipher
Real-World Cryptography — David Wong The most practical of the three, organised around what you actually meet (TLS, tokens, hardware) rather than around primitives
An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography — Hoffstein, Pipher, Silverman When you want the number theory properly rather than by analogy

Standards and specifications

  • NIST FIPS and SP publications ↗ — AES (FIPS 197), SHA-2 (FIPS 180-4), SHA-3 (FIPS 202), HMAC (FIPS 198-1), and since 2024 ML-KEM and ML-DSA (FIPS 203/204). The test vectors this library checks against live here.
  • RFC 4231 ↗ — HMAC test vectors, the ones every implementation is checked against.
  • RFC 8446 ↗ — TLS 1.3, and unusually readable for a protocol spec.
  • RFC 9106 ↗ — Argon2, and the parameter guidance that actually matters.

Things to do rather than read

  • CryptoHack ↗ — exercises that make you break things. The closest thing to this library's method, done as a game.
  • Cryptopals ↗ — the original set. Harder, older, and the first two sets are still the best introduction to why the joins fail.

Reference and lookup

  • Latacora's Cryptographic Right Answers ↗ — an opinionated "use this, not that" list. Read it as a starting point rather than as gospel, and note its date.
  • Wikipedia ↗ — genuinely good on this subject, because the articles are heavily watched by people who care about precision.

Sibling libraries