Free online course on Cryptography at Coursera

[Chan Ag]

Hi,

There's a new course happening on Cryptography https://class.coursera.org/crypto-011 at Coursera. Looks like it's quite good.

I just went through the first four videos today and I really liked them.

I am not really planning to follow the course schedule as such because I know that I will not be able to follow it through till the completion. So I'm just going through the videos when I can -- they're like interesting. But for anyone else that is interested, you might want to check that link.

The course had started on the 30th of June.

Chan.

Piet, if you happen to read this, I will complete that Scala course as soon as I can ( I have the videos) .. Hmm :-)

[Chan Ag]

The best thing about this course is this --

Coursera wrote:Course pace suggestion


Some students are taking this course while working a full time job and may find the weekly pace a bit demanding. It is perfectly fine to take the course at "half speed" by taking two weeks to complete every week. My plan is to have the courses repeat frequently -- the next iteration will start shortly after this one ends. Students can take two weeks to complete every week and officially complete the course along with students in the next iteration.

Dan Boneh
Stanford University

[Matthew Brown]

Yes, I enjoyed that one - I did it at the beginning of the year. Quite theoretical (which I liked), but I've already been able to apply some of it practically in a current project (more specifically, I was able to realise that the way I had been handling certain aspects of encryption were insecure).

There's a part 2 planned as well that I'm hoping to do - currently scheduled for September (https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto2).

[Junilu Lacar]

A related reference: Security Engineering: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html - 2nd edition is available for free - has a chapter on Cryptography that covers some of the coursera course materials as well as other security topics.

[Chan Ag]

Thanks for the link, Junilu.

The book you have linked was published in 2008 and hence it must have more updated content on some of the topics that I really require to understand very well.

So far I had been referring to Coderanch Sercurity FAQ ( which is very good, by the way ), Java Security by Scott Oaks ( a 2001 publication -- difficult to follow some parts because of the API changes but still very relevant and a really nice book ), and some online material ( videos and such ) for stuff on OAuth authentication with IBM SmartCloud etc ( I think there are no good books that were released around 2013, so I can't find this content in a book ). But I really needed a good reference book that was more current than the ones I had. I had planned to order Secret And Lies later but it seems the book you have suggested is quite good.

I will give it a shot. Thanks.