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Papers

A curated list of cryptography papers, articles, tutorials and howtos for non-cryptographers.

Notes

The goal of this list is to provide educational reading material for different levels of cryptographic knowledge. I started it because my day job onboarding engineers at Cossack Labs includes educating them in cryptographic matters and giving advise what to read on specific topics, and that involves finding the same materials repeatedly. Hopefully, it will be useful for someone else as well.

It is aimed at people who are using cryptography in higher-level security systems to implement database encryption, secure sharing, end-to-end encryption in various schemes, and should understand how it works, how it fails and how it is attacked. It is not a list of notable / important / historically important papers (although many of them are here). It is not aimed at academics (who have better grasp of what they need anyway), nor it is aimed for systematic study of wanna-be cryptographers (who better follow structured approach under professional guidance).

It will be extended gradually as I find something of "must-have" value. Pull requests are very welcome.

The list

Introducing people to data security and cryptography

Simple: cryptography for non-engineers

Brief introductions

General cryptographic interest


Specific topics

Hashing

Secret key cryptography

Cryptanalysis

Public key cryptography: General and DLP

Public key cryptography: Elliptic-curve crypto

Zero Knowledge Proofs

Key Management

Math

  • PRIMES is in P - Unconditional deterministic polynomial-time algorithm that determines whether an input number is prime or composite.

Post-quantum cryptography


Books

That seems somewhat out of scope, isn't it? But these are books only fully available online for free. Read them as a sequence of papers if you will.


Lectures and educational courses


Online crypto challenges

Not exactly papers, but crypto challenges are awesome educational material.

License

CC0

To the extent possible under law, author has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.