Getting cryptography right is paramount for ensuring digital security in the modern world.The mathematical ideas and theory behind cryptography are quite hard to break,while theimplementations (transforming mathematical ideas to reality via engineering processes,e.g.,programming code and designing hardware)have orders of magnitude more vulnerabil-ities that are much easier to exploit.For these reasons,malicious actors regularly targetflaws in implementations in order to “break”crypto.We wanted to capture these attackswith an organized approach so that engineers working in information security can use thisbook to build an elementary intuition for how cryptographic engineering usually falls preyto adversaries.
In the upcoming chapters,we will dive into the technical details of how cryptography is implemented and exploited,but before that let’s first go through a high-level view of whatcryptography is.