About This Book

The CryptoParty Handbook was born from a suggestion by Marta Peirano (http://petitemedia.es) and Adam Hyde (http://booksprints.net) after the first Berlin CryptoParty, held on the 29th of August, 2012. Julian Oliver (http://julianoliver.com) and Danja Vasiliev (http://k0a1a.net), co-organisers of the Berlin CryptoParty along with Marta were very enthusiastic about the idea, seeing a need for a practical working book with a low entry-barrier to use in subsequent parties. Asher Wolf, originator of the CryptoParty movement, was then invited to run along and the project was born.

This book was written in the first 3 days of October 2012 at Studio Weise7, Berlin, surrounded by fine food and a small ocean of coffee. Approximately 20 people were involved in its creation, some more than others, some local and some far.

The writing methodology used, BookSprint (http://booksprints.net), is all about minimising any obstruction between expertise and the published page. Face-to-face discussion and dynamic task-assignment were a huge part of getting the job done, like any good CryptoParty!

The open source, web-based (HTML5 and CSS) writing platform BookType (http://booktype.pro) was chosen for the editing task, helping such a tentacular feat of parallel development to happen with relative ease. Asher also opened a couple of TitanPad pages to crowd-source the Manifesto and HowTo CryptoParty chapters.

Combined, this became the official CryptoParty Handbook by midnight October the 3rd, GMT+1.

The Book Sprint was 3 days in length and the full list of onsite participants included:

This version of the handbook has since moved to GitHub to collaboratively edit it. Find it at https://github.com/cryptoparty/handbook.
If you see areas that need improvement or simply come across a typo, create a GitHub account and start editing, commenting or creating issues. For help using git and GitHub, see https://help.github.com/.

CryptoParty HandBook Credits

Facilitated by:

  • Adam Hyde

Core Team:

  • Marta Peirano
  • Asher Wolf
  • Julian Oliver
  • Danja Vasiliev
  • Malte Dik
  • Jan Gerber
  • Brian Newbold
  • Brendan Howell

Assisted by:

  • Teresa Dillon
  • AT
  • Carola Hesse
  • Chris Pinchen
  • ‘LiamO’
  • ‘l3lackEyedAngels’
  • ‘Story89’
  • Travis Tueffel

GitHub migration, packaging and maintenance by:

  • Yuval Adam
  • Samuel Carlisle
  • Daniel Kinsman
  • pettter
  • Jens Kubieziel
  • Uwe Lippmann
  • Kai Engert

Cover Image by Emile Denichaud.

Other material included:

The manuals used in the second half of this book borrow from 2 books sprinted by FLOSS (free/libre/open-source software) manuals:

  • “How to Bypass Internet Censorship” 2008 & 2010 Adam Hyde (Facilitator), Alice Miller, Edward Cherlin, Freerk Ohling, Janet Swisher, Niels Elgaard Larsen, Sam Tennyson, Seth Schoen, Tomas Krag, Tom Boyle, Nart Villeneuve, Ronald Deibert, Zorrino Zorrinno, Austin Martin, Ben Weissmann, Ariel Viera, Niels Elgaard Larsen, Steven Murdoch, Ross Anderson, Helen Varley Jamieson, Roberto Rastapopoulos, Karen Reilly, Erinn Clark, Samuel L. Tennyson, A Ravi

  • “Basic Internet Security” 2011 Adam Hyde (Facilitator), Jan Gerber, Dan Hassan, Erik Stein, Sacha van Geffen, Mart van Santen, Lonneke van der Velden, Emile den Tex and Douwe Schmidt

All content in the CryptoParty Handbook is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0).

All chapters © the contributors unless otherwise noted below.