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Few books deal with block ciphers exclusively, but almost any text on cryptography has a major section devoted to block ciphers. See our cryptography bibliography for additional sources.

Reference books

Two books are very widely used as references. Both are now somewhat dated, having been published before the AES competition so they do not include that generation of ciphers.

• Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C by Bruce Schneier, Wiley 1996, ISBN 0-471-11709-9, widely used by programmers — home page
• Handbook of Applied Cryptography by A. J. Menezes, P. C. van Oorschot, and S. A. Vanstone, CRC Press 1996, ISBN 0-8493-8523-7, with more of the math and theory than Schneier — PDF download

A more recent guide is:

• Practical cryptography by Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier, Wiley 2003, ISBN 978-0471223573 — home page

AES

• The Design of Rijndael: AES - The Advanced Encryption Standard, by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, Springer 2002, ISBN 978-3540425809 — publisher's page

University level texts

• Cryptography Theory and Practice by Doug Stinson, CRC Press 2005, ISBN 9781584885085 — home page
• Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Phillip Rogaway and Mihir Bellare, a mathematical introduction to theoretical cryptography including reduction-based security proofs — PDF download.

Theses

There are several theses that contributed important ideas to block cipher design:

• Carlisle Adams A Formal and Practical Design Procedure for Substitution-Permutation Network Cryptosystems, Queen's University (1990), introducing the CAST ciphers
• Lai Xuejia On the design and security of block ciphers [1]. Hartung-Gorre (1992). doi:10.3929/ethz-a-000646711, with the original proposal for IDEA