Part I — Fundamentals
The foundation: what cryptography is, what it guarantees, and against which adversary. Read it before the other parts — everything else presumes this vocabulary.
| # | Section | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aerial view of cryptography | The defining sentence, the five questions, the four layers, the two eras. |
| 2 | Goals and adversary models | Kerckhoffs, formal goals, threat model (COA→CCA), perfect vs. computational security, confusion/diffusion. |
Next part: II — Primitives — block and stream ciphers, hashes, MACs, and the leap to asymmetric cryptography.
For dense lookup, see Part VIII — Reference.