David Wong

cryptologie.net

cryptography, security, and random thoughts

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity, research advisor at Archetype, and author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a cryptography architect of Mina at O(1) Labs, the security lead for Libra/Diem at Facebook, and a security engineer at the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. Welcome to my blog about cryptography, security, and other related topics.

← back to all posts

Real-World Cryptography, a bit more than a year later

blog

real world

source: redbubble

Three years ago, in the middle of writing my book Real-World Cryptography, I wrote about Why I’m writing a book on cryptography. I believed there was a market of engineers (and researchers) that was not served by the current offerings. There ought to be something more approachable, with less equations and theory and history, with more diagrams, and including advanced topics like cryptocurrencies, post-quantum cryptography, multi-party computations, zero-knowledge proof, hardware cryptography, end-to-end encrypted messaging, and so on.

The blogpost went viral and I ended up reusing it as a prologue to the book.

Now that Real-world cryptography has been released for more than a year, it turns out my 2-year bet was not for nothing :). The book has been very well received, including being used in a number of universities by professors, and has been selling quite well.

The only problem is that it mostly sold through Manning (my publisher), meaning that the book did not receive many reviews on Amazon.

So this is post is for you. If you’ve bought the book, and enjoyed it (or parts of it), please leave a review over there. This will go a long way to help me establish the book and allow more people to find it (Amazon being the biggest source of readers today).

← back to all posts blog • 2023-02-26
currently reading:
Real-World Cryptography, a bit more than a year later
02-26 blog
📖 my book
Real-World Cryptography is available from Manning Publications.
A practical guide to applied cryptography for developers and security professionals.
🎙️ my podcast
Two And A Half Coins on Spotify.
Discussing cryptocurrencies, databases, banking, and distributed systems.
📺 my youtube
Cryptography videos on YouTube.
Video explanations of cryptographic concepts and security topics.