Is there a good Perl book on cryptology?

Question

Is there a good Perl book on cryptology?

Answer 1

• Mastering Algorithms with Perl (O'REilly) - covers cryptography.

  Here's a review from Crypto-book critic web site:

  This book deserves a good rating, but since I'm rating it on its crypto content, it only gets an ok rating. A great book to have if you're a serious perl programmer. 27 pages discuss number theory, and 40 pages discuss cryptography. In the cryptography section are perl code samples (available online) demonstrating areas such as SSLeay.pm, winnowing/chaffing, and steganography. (Hopefully, you're not doing any serious cryptography projects in perl.)

  O'Reilly also has several Perl crypto articles - e.g. here and here.

• Cryptography Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples - has some Perl examples

• Not a book but a great list: 10 things: The most useful Perl modules for cryptography and authentication

P.S. Why are you asking? Are you applying to this job? "Senior Software Engineer - C/C++ - Cryptography - Perl - Python". Position opened 4/19/2010 :)

Answer 2

Practical Cryptography, by Bruce Schneier.

The book is not Perl specific, but it doesn't really need to be - read it and you'll learn about all the different hashes, ciphers and signatures, which are the best for any given situation, and more importantly how to apply them correctly without building an insecure system.

Once you know what cryptographic tools you want to use, and how to use them, you can find the relevant tool on CPAN. For example, look at the POD for Crypt::RSA. You don't need a book to learn how to use the modules - you'd be better served reading about pure crypto.