Hacking Secret Ciphers With Python

If you like Cryptography and you like to learn programming language, then i would suggest you to read Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python. It's available for free in PDF format or the online HTML version or you can buy it for $25 in Amazon.

What you will get is a fun tutorial with Python on Cryptography. This book is aimed at people who have no experience programming or with cryptography. The book goes through writing Python programs that not only implement several ciphers but also can hack these ciphers.

The book's website is available on http://inventwithpython.com/hacking

Online Cryptool

For those who are learning on Cryptography, you can try the online version of CrypTool. It has a lot of content that can be used to learn more about cryptography, including Ciphers (classic, stream, block, symmetric, asymmetric, etc), Coding methods (ASCII, Bacon, Base64, Code39, Huffman, Morse), Analysis Tool (Autocorrelation, Frequency analysis, n-gram analysis), and several highlights that are related to Cryptography in overall.

If you prefer to have a multiplatform application, you can try to use JCrypTool.

Cryptography Class is Live

This morning, i received an email from the instructor of Cryptography Class, Professor Dan Boneh telling that the Crytography Class has been officially available, even though the class will start next week on March, 12.

Here's the email i got:

We're now live!!! Thank you all for your patience during these past couple of weeks. The first week of lectures, slides, and problem sets are all posted. The discussion forum is live. Please click here to get started:

http://crypto-class.org/

Even though you've already signed up, you need to register and choose a password in the left side of the login box the first time you go to the site.

The class will last for six weeks and officially starts on March 12. We will be covering two topics per week. Each topic will consist of a series of lectures with some embedded questions. There will be a weekly programming assignment plus a weekly problem set. The first week's assignments are posted and are due on March 26th.

I encourage you to participate in our online discussion forums by asking and answering questions and discussing the material. We also welcome feedback on the course and the assignments.

Please also forward this email to friends who might be interested in learning about cryptography or who might just be interested in this new form of online education. If you have friends taking the class, I strongly encourage you to form a study group to discuss the material. You might even find that it's more fun to watch the videos in a group.

Welcome again and I hope that you find this class stimulating and thought provoking.

Dan Boneh

It seems that they used Amazon's Web Service for the infrastructures so that it won't give them the burden to maintain the servers that might be overwhelmed with students, lecturers, researchers, scientists that joined the class.

Online Security Class

Stanford and Berkeley university will hold an online Security Class next February with Professor Dan Boneh, John Mitchell, and Dawn Song as the instructors.

In this class you will learn how to :

• Design secure systems 
• Write secure code
• Find vulnerabilities in code 
• Design software systems that limit the impact of security vulnerabilities
• Building secure systems

All of them will be added with several topics such as :

• memory safety vulnerabilities
• techniques and tools for vulnerability detection
• sandboxing and isolation
• web security
• network security
• malware detection and defense
• mobile platform security

More and more universities are offering accredited online college classes on specialized subjects. For those who's interested in Cryptography can also join the Cryptography class which will be hosted by Dan Boneh from Stanford. The class starts in January, so be quick to sign up.

The online class is free!!

Update (March 3, 2012): The class has been postponed until further notification from Stanford due to some technical problems.

Understanding DES

In the past, i thought DES was very complicated, due to 16 rounds of processing, including a complex F function, but after preparing for giving lectures about Block Cipher, Feistel Cipher, and DES algorithm, i found it very easy to understand.

Thanks to a good book by Mark Stamp, Information Security: Principles and Practice, he showed me an easy way to understand about DES principles and how i can manage to taught my students about DES. Anyway, i found some mistakes on his book regarding EP and IP tables and i have asked him, but until now, i haven't received any reply from him