Introduction

Cryptography is everywhere — and yet most of us treat it like magic.

From encrypted chats and online banking to firmware updates on satellites, the systems we rely on daily are secured (or compromised) by cryptography. And too often, it fails — not because the math was wrong, but because the implementation was.

This book exists to change that.

You’re not here to memorize equations. You’re here to understand, implement, and apply cryptographic primitives to real-world systems using a language designed to prevent mistakes before they happen: Rust.

Whether you’re building infrastructure, smart contracts, embedded firmware, or secure APIs, this book gives you the tools to use cryptography safely, idiomatically, and fearlessly — one primitive, one project, one domain at a time.

Who This Book Is For

• Rust developers who want to understand and apply cryptography
• Security engineers transitioning to Rust
• Curious hackers tired of black-box crypto
• Systems developers who care about safety, correctness, and resilience

What You’ll Learn

• The foundations and mental models behind symmetric and asymmetric cryptography
• How to use modern cryptographic crates in Rust safely and idiomatically
• Where cryptographic primitives show up in real-world domains (blockchain, embedded, medical, etc.)
• How to design, test, and publish your own secure Rust crypto crate

What This Book Is Not

• ❌ A math-heavy cryptography textbook
• ❌ A copy-paste cookbook
• ❌ A blockchain hype manual

We won’t drown you in proofs, but we’ll explain just enough math to build intuition. We’ll write real code — not just use libraries. And we’ll focus on systems-level crypto, not speculative tokens.

What You’ll Need

• ✅ Basic experience with Rust (enough to build a CLI or follow cargo run)
• ✅ Comfort with reading code, refactoring, and using crates
• ✅ Curiosity, and a bias toward safe, practical, applied learning

Let’s begin

This book won’t make you a cryptographer in the academic sense — but it will make you something just as rare and valuable: A Rust engineer who understands, wields, and applies cryptography with precision, context, and confidence.

You won’t just read — you’ll build.
Focused implementations and applied examples are available here and updated weekly.