Thanks, I agree with almost all of this. I didn't mean to imply that Cryptopals is how you become a cryptographer, just that it's a fantastic way to get down and dirty with cryptography, and learn a ton.
These challenges are not easy, and you need some programming sophistication to get through them, since most of them require you to actually implement well-known primitives and algorithms (like Diffie-Hellman, RSA, DSA, PRNGs, etc.)
And to do that correctly, you end up studying a _lot_ of side material.
You do come out of the other end learning about various classes of attacks, but not necessarily how to avoid them -- that depends entirely upon your intellectual curiosity. :-)
These challenges are not easy, and you need some programming sophistication to get through them, since most of them require you to actually implement well-known primitives and algorithms (like Diffie-Hellman, RSA, DSA, PRNGs, etc.)
And to do that correctly, you end up studying a _lot_ of side material.
You do come out of the other end learning about various classes of attacks, but not necessarily how to avoid them -- that depends entirely upon your intellectual curiosity. :-)