// Comparison

Codebreaking vs Serious Cryptography: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Cryptography, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Beginner

4/52023

Codebreaking

A Practical Guide

Elonka Dunin, Klaus Schmeh

Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh teach classical cryptanalysis through real, unsolved ciphers, from 19th-century newspaper personal ads to wartime telegrams, using free tools like CrypTool 2.

Intermediate

5/52024

Serious Cryptography

A Practical Introduction to Modern Encryption

Jean-Philippe Aumasson

Jean-Philippe Aumasson's working introduction to modern cryptography, written for engineers who need both intuition and enough mathematical depth to evaluate the choices a library is making for them.

Read this if

Hobbyist codebreakers and security people who want the historical and puzzle-solving side of cryptography, not the mathematical theory. Dunin maintains the web's reference list of unsolved ciphers and Schmeh is the most-published cryptology author alive, so the case studies are the real, still-open ones.

Engineers who already know what crypto to use and want to understand why it works at the primitive level. The middle book in the modern crypto stack: deeper than Real-World Cryptography, shallower than the academic textbooks.

Skip this if

Readers who want modern applied cryptography, algorithm design, or anything about securing systems; this is classical/historical cipher-breaking (substitution, polyalphabetic, transposition), not AES or TLS. Pair with Serious Cryptography or Cryptography Engineering for that side.

Beginners or readers who haven't yet decided which primitives to use; start with Wong first. Also wrong for cryptography researchers who need formal proofs.

Key takeaways

Teaches cryptanalysis on real, unsolved historical ciphers rather than textbook exercises, which keeps the puzzle-solving stakes genuine.
CrypTool 2 and other free software get hands-on coverage, so the skills transfer to actually attacking a ciphertext, not just reading about it.
Several of the book's case studies remain unsolved mysteries today; readers are explicitly invited to take a crack at them.

Modern primitives can be understood by engineers, given the right framing — Aumasson's choice to bound the math is the book's defining design decision.
The 2nd edition (2024) covers post-quantum cryptography (Kyber, Dilithium, SPHINCS+) at the depth a deploying engineer actually needs.
The chapters on hash-function attacks (length extension, multi-collisions) are the clearest in print and explain why half of the production bugs in HMAC-adjacent code happen.

How they compare

We rate Serious Cryptography higher (5/5 against 4/5 for Codebreaking). For most readers, that means Serious Cryptography is the primary pick and Codebreaking is a useful follow-up.

Codebreaking is pitched at beginner level. Serious Cryptography is pitched at intermediate level. Read the easier one first if you're not yet comfortable with the topic.

Codebreaking and Serious Cryptography both cover Cryptography, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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