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Exercices et problèmes de cryptographie vs Security Engineering: Which Should You Read?

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

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3/52023

Exercices et problèmes de cryptographie

Damien Vergnaud

A rigorous problem book for learning cryptography — over 150 corrected exercises with course summaries, for L3/master/engineering students — by a French academic cryptographer.

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5/52020

Security Engineering

A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems

Ross Anderson

Ross Anderson's comprehensive textbook on the design of secure systems, covering protocols, access control, side channels, economics of security, and policy.

Read this if

Students and self-learners who want to actually practise cryptographic mathematics: corrected exercises on symmetric, public-key and (in recent editions) post-quantum primitives. Preface by Jacques Stern.

Anyone who builds, audits, or governs systems where failure has real-world consequences: banking, healthcare, voting, telecom, defence. The single most important security book ever written, and the rare textbook that improves with each edition.

Skip this if

Readers wanting applied, deploy-this guidance or a narrative introduction; this is a university exercise book and assumes real mathematical maturity.

Readers looking for a hands-on tooling guide or a quick certification primer. Anderson works at the systems and policy layer; if you need to learn how to use Burp, this is not it. The 1,200 pages also reward patient readers, not skimmers.

Key takeaways

A genuine exercise-and-problem book — the corrected problems are the point, not prose.
Covers symmetric, asymmetric and, in recent editions, post-quantum constructions.
Best as a companion to a crypto course; pairs naturally with Avoine et al.

Most production failures are economic and organisational, not cryptographic: incentives shape outcomes far more than primitives.
Threat models from one domain (banking, telecom, military) generalize to the next once you know what to look for, and Anderson is the best in the field at showing you.
Side channels, supply chains, and policy are first-class engineering concerns, not footnotes.

How they compare

We rate Security Engineering higher (5/5 against 3/5 for Exercices et problèmes de cryptographie). For most readers, that means Security Engineering is the primary pick and Exercices et problèmes de cryptographie is a useful follow-up.

Both books target advanced-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.

Exercices et problèmes de cryptographie and Security Engineering both cover Cryptography, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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