For any of you who want to develop a deeper understanding of what is mentioned in the blog post, I can recommend the book Serious Cryptography by Jean-Philippe Aumasson. It's one of the best and most accessible crypto books that have recently been written.

https://nostarch.com/seriouscrypto

At this point, Serious Cryptography is probably the best first book on cryptography for laypeople, but really I think both books still have value.

I can recommend the book Serious Cryptography by Jean-Philippe Aumasson. I also concur with the suggestion of cryptopals for training exercises.

Serious Cryptography by JP Aumasson is the one I picked up first (it is still early access but you will get the finished version when done.)

https://www.nostarch.com/seriouscrypto

The book: Serious Cryptography by Jean-Philippe Aumasson.

Serious Cryptography is currently avaiable in the Humble Book Bundle if you pay $15 or more[1], sale ends in 1 day 15 hours as of writing.

Would you recommend any other books in the bundle tptacek?

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hacking-for-the-holidays-...

I can recommend the book Serious Cryptography published by nostarch press as a solid source

I recommend Serious Cryptography by Jean-Philippe Aumasson. After reading it, you will gain enough understanding to compose cryptographic primitives and build your own secure system based on well-known best practices, as long as you don't deviate too much from the golden paths. Although with that, you still won't know how to design or implement these primitives yourself. It's like having a nice toolkit of screwdrivers, hammers, spanners etc to build your thing, but you can't build those tools themselves.

An archived email to a mailing list from one person in 2013 that can never be corrected or amended isn't the most reliable way to spread information about cryptography engineering.

What does Gutmann say in 2019 about /dev/urandom vs /dev/random?

Which of the two do JP Aumasson (author of Serious Cryptography and inventor of several cryptography algorithms used today, including BLAKE2 and SipHash), Dan Bernstein (Salsa20, ChaCha20, Poly1305, Curve25519, Ed25519, etc.), Matthew Green (professor associated with the TrueCrypt audit), et al. prefer in their own designs?

I can promise you the answer is /dev/urandom. Why do they prefer /dev/urandom? Because of the reasons outlined in the article I linked (which, unlike the mailing list post you linked, is occasionally updated with corrections).

It's not really that complicated: Use /dev/urandom.

If you're on an ancient Linux kernel, you can poll /dev/random until it's available if you're uncertain whether or not /dev/urandom has ever been seeded. Once /dev/random is available, don't use /dev/random, use /dev/urandom. This side-steps the "/dev/urandom never blocks" concern that people love to cite in their fearmongering. This is essentially what getrandom(2) does.

If you're on a recent Linux kernel, you can say "just use getrandom(2)" instead of "just use /dev/urandom", but the premise of the discussion is whether to use /dev/random or /dev/urandom not which of all possible options should be used.

See also: https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/05/how-generate-secure-rando...

The belief that /dev/random must somehow be better than /dev/urandom is, frankly, security theater.

Yes there is some math experience assumed. I know your question was about recommended pre-requisites, not alternatives/supplements to this book, but let me just provide you with a few alternates that are a bit easier to step into.

1) Christof Paar's book, mentioned already by EFruit. It's currently available as a free download, but that will close up soon, so go download it now. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-04101-3 I bought the hardcopy ~8 years ago and still refer to it. (Note: also as mentioned, Prof. Paar has something like 20 one-hour lectures -- in English -- on Youtube.)

2) Jean-Philippe Aumasson's excellent book (2018) "Serious Cryptography". Very practical, very readable. JPA is the author of the Blake cryptographic hash functions.

3) David Wong's upcoming book "Real World Cryptography" (Manning, 2020). I've read parts of it via Manning's early access program, the book isn't released yet, but good stuff. David blogs regularly too.

That should give you enough to chew on for a while!