I recently finished Matasano Crypto Challenges and it was an interesting experience. I started doing them because @tqbf tweets with standings showed up in my tweet feed and made me feel competitive. Now I'm very glad I did them.
Update: competition is not running anymore. All exercises and official solutions are available on cryptopals.org. My solutions are written in java and stored in matasano-cryptopals-solutions github repository.
Crypto Challenges is a collection of 48 exercises that demonstrate attacks on real world ciphers and protocols. Exercises exploit both badly designed systems and subtle implementation bugs in theoretically rock solid crypto. Most importantly, they make you see how tricky the security can be and how much various details matter.
If you solved all exercises while the competition was running, Matasano donated 20$ to a charity.
Update: competition is not running anymore. All exercises and official solutions are available on cryptopals.org. My solutions are written in java and stored in matasano-cryptopals-solutions github repository.
Crypto Challenges is a collection of 48 exercises that demonstrate attacks on real world ciphers and protocols. Exercises exploit both badly designed systems and subtle implementation bugs in theoretically rock solid crypto. Most importantly, they make you see how tricky the security can be and how much various details matter.
If you solved all exercises while the competition was running, Matasano donated 20$ to a charity.
