Matasano crypto challenges walkthrough

The Matasano crypto challenges were developed by a team working at Matasano Security (now NCC Security) as a teaching tool for cryptography.

The first challenges have the reader implement some basic utilities that are typically used in cryptography. They then move into implementing and breaking common cryptography algorithms. The scenarios they set up are pretty realistic and inspired from real attacks.

This book presents the 56 challenges as published on cryptopals.com, and describes the approach taken to solve them. Some pseudocode will be included for illustrative purposes. The complete Python code I wrote for all challenges can be found on my Github repository.

Why do I want to do this? I find the challenges incredibly fun and rewarding if you want to learn cryptographical theory with a eye toward practical applications. However even passionate "challengers" can get things wrong or remain stuck. I believe that a good explanation of the theory can help learn new concepts without losing passion in crypto just because you can't solve one problem. I support the author's decision of not giving too much on the official website: we don't want to make things too easy now do we :)

This book is work in progress. In Apr 2018, I started working on it again.