Hacker News Reader

Do you have any good learning resources on encryption? any Github repositories worth mirroring, with the actual implementations? I am a programmer with zero experience in that area but want to some day be able to "roll out my own crypto" if necessary :)

EDIT: I'm not afraid of all the math I need to learn, just point me in the right direction.

View on HN

Cryptography is more math than programming unfortunately. It might take a lot of time to become apt at it, but it is a very commendable goal.

The problem isn't necessarily in using a weaker encryption, it's that you can detect that you can't break some crypto, and arrest whoever is using that. This won't stop illegal use of course, but will stop anyone interested in their privacy

> This won't stop illegal use of course, but will stop anyone interested in their privacy

It won't stop much on the long term. Techniques like chaffing and winnowing[0] can be used to provide confidentiality while preserving plausible deniability.

[0]: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv98a.pdf

I'd recommend going through one of the hands-on crypto challenges. Matasano did one a few years ago if I recall correctly.

Basically learn how to build crypto primitives, and how to break them. And eventually you'll get to those that so far no one managed to break.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com