A flamegraph of Real-World Cryptography posted March 2021

I've now spent 2 years writing my introduction on applied cryptography: Real-World Cryptography, which you can already read online here. (If you're wondering why I'm writing another book on cryptography check this post.)

I've written all the chapters, but there's still a lot of work to be done to make sure that it's good (collecting feedback), that it's consistent (unification of diagrams, of style, etc.), and that it's well structured.

For the latter point, I thought I would leverage the fact that I'm an engineer and use a tool that's commonly used to measure performance: a flamegraph!

It looks like this, and you can click around to zoom on different chapters and sections:

How does this work?

The bottom layer shows all the chapter in order, and the width of the boxes show how lengthy they are. The more you go up, the more you "nest" yourself into a section. For example, clicking on the chapter 9: Secure transport, you can see that it is composed of several sections with the longest being "How does TLS work", which itself is composed of several subsections with the longest being "The TLS handshake".

What is it good for?

Using this flamegraph, I can now analyze how consistent the book is.

Distribution

The good news is that the chapters all seem pretty evenly distributed, for the exception of shorter chapters 3 (MACs), 6 (asymmetric encryption), and 16 (final remarks). This is also expected are these chapters are much more straightforward than the rest of the book.

Too length

Looks like the bigger chapters are in order: post-quantum crypto, authenticated encryption, hardware cryptography, user authentication, secure transport. This is not great, as post-quantum crypto is supposed to be a chapter for the curious people who get to the end of the book, not a chapter to make the book bigger... The other chapters are also unnecessary long. My goal is going to be to reduce these chapters' length in the coming weeks.

Too nested

This flamegraph is also useful to quickly see if there are sections that are way too nested. For example, Chapter 9 on secure transport has a lot of mini sections on TLS. Also, look at some of the section in chapter 5: Key exchanges > Key exchange standards > ECDH > ECDH standard. That's too much.

Not nested enough

Some chapters have almost no nested sections at all. For example, chapter 8 (randomness) and 16 (conclusion) are just successions of depth-1 sections. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily, but if a section becomes too large it makes sense to either split it into several sections, or have subsections in it.

I've noticed, for example, that the first section of chapter 3 on MACs titled "What is a MAC?" is quite long, and doesn't have subsections.

(Same for section 6.2 asymmetric encryption in practice and section 8.2 what is a PRNG)

Errors

I also managed to spot some errors in nested sections by doing this! So that was pretty cool as well :)

EDIT: If you're interested in doing something like this with your own project, I published the script here.