An immodest proposal, and some light reading for a VB code-monkey

[hairyears]

Interesting snippets can be found by following links with Ross Anderson's name attached, especially those that lead you to his research group at Cambridge. Last night I stumbled upon this: A technical paper from the cryptographic gentlemen of Cambridge about social vectors in viral propagation. The authors are George Daneziz and Mike Bond, who

Comments

[mangosteen]

"Applied Cryptography" by Schneier will definitely help you understand the protocols and algorithms. It doesn't go much into the actual code, though.

[gerald_duck]

Agreed. Ross's own book, Security Engineering has little about cryptography but a lot of sound stuff about security in a broader context.

The other book in my "big three" is The Code Book.

Oh, and Ross's group has a blog.

[olithered]

...which is syndicated (lightbluepaper).

[katsmeat]

Schneier is the book people recommend by default, and with good reason. I also liked Mel & Baker's Cryptography Decripted - which was a good getting-up-to-speed book before launching into Schneier.

The Code Book is a popular science level, history of cryptography. Some of the chapters are interesting though most of the book deals with things purely of historical interest, The Babington Plot, the Beale Cypher, Zimmermann telegram etc. The same ground gets much more detailed coverage in David Kahn's 'The Codebreakers'. This is a classic text and probably gets orderd in bulk by GCHQ.