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A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography
703 pages, ebook
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 3, 2026
I spent 3 and a half years reading this book. I ended up reading everything except for the parts on cryptanalysis of elliptic curves/prime factoring and one or two of the chapters on signatures. This book is huge and covers a lot.
I think there's a pretty wide variance in the quality of chapters. The chapters on hash-based signatures and on password hashing/memory-hard functions are some of my favorite educational writing about cryptography. To contrast, I think the zero-knowledge proofs chapter is weird and incomplete, and some of the chapters on increasingly complex security notions for (a)symmetric encryption are hard to read. There are also still blank and incomplete chapters/sections. I would love to come back and read the finished lattice cryptography section and maybe eventually FHE section.
The book also has really good problems after every chapter. Most of the problems are either really good exercises in writing up proofs, or a fun problem you can think about for a few hours. One of my "oh shit" AI moments a few months ago was putting some of the problems I could never figure out into GPT Pro and getting the correct answers after not that much thinking.
Reading this book has been such a journey. I started reading it at my old job as my "professional development" thing. I used to stay in the office on Friday nights and get Indian takeout and work on the problems. I have worked on it on and off throughout grad school. In the last year I have gotten to meet Dan and have a paper with him, probably partially because of this book.
I think there's a pretty wide variance in the quality of chapters. The chapters on hash-based signatures and on password hashing/memory-hard functions are some of my favorite educational writing about cryptography. To contrast, I think the zero-knowledge proofs chapter is weird and incomplete, and some of the chapters on increasingly complex security notions for (a)symmetric encryption are hard to read. There are also still blank and incomplete chapters/sections. I would love to come back and read the finished lattice cryptography section and maybe eventually FHE section.
The book also has really good problems after every chapter. Most of the problems are either really good exercises in writing up proofs, or a fun problem you can think about for a few hours. One of my "oh shit" AI moments a few months ago was putting some of the problems I could never figure out into GPT Pro and getting the correct answers after not that much thinking.
Reading this book has been such a journey. I started reading it at my old job as my "professional development" thing. I used to stay in the office on Friday nights and get Indian takeout and work on the problems. I have worked on it on and off throughout grad school. In the last year I have gotten to meet Dan and have a paper with him, probably partially because of this book.
June 1, 2026
The breadth and depth covered by Boneh and Shoup’s “A graduate course in Applied cryptography” is astounding to say the least. From Cryptanalysis of RC4 to Random Self Reducibility of the discrete logarithm problem, a very wide range of topics are covered. Despite the qualifier of “applied” the authors go into great mathematical rigour in order to define and prove properties of said cryptographic objects. Fundamental results are proven, and much to most of what is built depends on previously proven results.
It is difficult to compare the book to Lindell and Katz’s Introduction to modern cryptography. I think it assumes a reader with greater mathematical maturity, but given the former, more can be obtained from Boneh and Shoup.
For more advanced topics like ZKP, MPC, PSI, and PQC the book provides a good start. As these topics are relatively new, few or maybe even no good textbooks exist at this point in time, thus making Boneh and Shoup a good starting point before diving into academic papers.
TLDR; I would call the book the bible of applied cryptography.
It is difficult to compare the book to Lindell and Katz’s Introduction to modern cryptography. I think it assumes a reader with greater mathematical maturity, but given the former, more can be obtained from Boneh and Shoup.
For more advanced topics like ZKP, MPC, PSI, and PQC the book provides a good start. As these topics are relatively new, few or maybe even no good textbooks exist at this point in time, thus making Boneh and Shoup a good starting point before diving into academic papers.
TLDR; I would call the book the bible of applied cryptography.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews