Cryptography

How does HTTPS encryption work?

Jan 26, 2023 by Lane Wagner

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure or HTTPS is an extension of the HTTP protocol. HTTPS secures the data transfer between client and server by encrypting all of the information communicated.

What is Cryptography? A Complete Overview

Sep 08, 2021 by Lane Wagner

What is cryptography? 🔗 Simply put, Cryptography provides a method for secure communication. It stops unauthorized parties, commonly referred to as adversaries or hackers, from gaining access to the secret messages communicated between authorized parties.

Intro to the One-Time Pad Cipher

Jun 28, 2021 by Lane Wagner

In cryptography, the one-time pad, or OTP is a way of encrypting information so securely that it’s impossible to be cracked.

What Is Entropy In Cryptography?

Sep 28, 2020 by Lane Wagner

If you’re familiar with the laws of thermodynamics, you may recognize the second law as the one that deals with entropy.

Elliptic Curve Cryptography: A Basic Introduction

Sep 17, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a modern public-key encryption technique famous for being smaller, faster, and more efficient than incumbents.

Is AES-256 Quantum Resistant?

Sep 10, 2020 by Lane Wagner

With quantum computers getting more powerful each year, many worry about the safety of modern encryption standards.

Bcrypt Step by Step

Aug 24, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Bcrypt is a key derivation function, which can be thought of as a special kind of hash function.

(Very) Basic Intro to Lattices in Cryptography

Aug 21, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Lattice-based cryptography, an important contender in the race for quantum-safe encryption, describes constructions of cryptographic primitives that involve mathematical lattices.

Shamir's Secret Sharing Step-By-Step

Aug 18, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Adi Shamir’s Secret Sharing is a cryptographic algorithm that allows distinct parties to jointly share ownership of a single secret by holding shares.

HMAC and MACs - The Inner Workings of JWTs

Aug 05, 2020 by Lane Wagner

HMACs and MACs are authentication codes and are often the backbone of JWT authentication systems. A Message Authentication Code (MAC) is a string of bits that depends on a secret key and is sent with a message to prove the message wasn’t tampered with.

(Very) Basic Intro to PGP (GPG)

Jul 27, 2020 by Lane Wagner

PGP, or its open-source alternative, GPG, is a program used to encrypt data such that only an authorized party can decrypt it.

(Very) Basic Intro to the Scrypt Hash

Jul 25, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Scrypt is a slow-by-design key derivation function designed to create strong cryptographic keys. Simply put, the purpose of the Scrypt hash is to create a fingerprint of its input data but to do it very slowly.

What is SHA-256?

Jul 08, 2020 by Lane Wagner

SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2), of which SHA-256 is a part, is one of the most popular hash algorithms around.

(Very) Basic Intro To White-Box Cryptography

Apr 27, 2020 by Lane Wagner

White-box cryptography combines methods of encryption and obfuscation to embed secret keys within application code. The goal is to combine code and keys in such a way that the two are indistinguishable to an attacker, and the new “white-box” program can be safely run in an insecure environment.

AES-256 Cipher – Python Cryptography Examples

Feb 06, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Want to encrypt text with a password or private key in Python? AES-256 is a solid symmetric cipher that is commonly used to encrypt data for oneself.

Will Banning Cryptography Keep the Country Safe?

Feb 05, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Politicians in the United States have been claiming recently that end-to-end encryption is certainly too dangerous to permit.

Is Open-Source Cryptography Really Secure?

Jan 30, 2020 by Lane Wagner

The purpose of cryptography is to keep information private, and the purpose of open-source is to make code public… So we shouldn’t open-source our cryptography algorithms right?

Hashing Passwords - Python Cryptography Examples

Jan 29, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Building a from-scratch server or using a lightweight framework is empowering. With that power comes responsibility, specifically the responsibility to securely store user’s passwords.

Why is Exclusive Or (XOR) Important in Cryptography?

Jan 18, 2020 by Lane Wagner

If you are getting into cryptography, or just trying to understand the fundamentals, you may have noticed that the exclusive or (XOR) operation is used quite often, especially in ciphers.

Cryptography Trends And News Going Into 2020

Jan 03, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Quantum Computing 🔗 Quantum computing may not be coming quite as fast as some in the field had certainly feared (or perhaps hoped).

Intro to The AES-256 Cipher

Jan 02, 2020 by Lane Wagner

AES, or “Advanced Encryption Standard”, is an encryption specification that uses the Rijndael cipher as its symmetric key ciphering algorithm.

(Very) Basic Intro to Hash Functions (SHA-256, MD5, etc)

Jan 01, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Hash functions are used to securely store passwords, find duplicate records, quickly store and retrieve data, among other useful computational tasks.

Basic Intro to Key Derivation Functions

Dec 30, 2019 by Lane Wagner

A Key Derivation Function, or KDF, is a cryptographic algorithm that derives one or more secret keys from a secret value.

Cryptology vs Cryptography - Definitions and Differences

Dec 16, 2019 by Lane Wagner

Many new developers are jumping right into writing code, usually for those fat paychecks, without learning much about the history of Computer Science.

Encoding vs Encryption - They Aren't the Same

Aug 14, 2019 by Lane Wagner

While encryption does involve various methods of encoding data, the two are absolutely not interchangeable. In fact, if you get them mixed up it can result in serious data breaches and security vulnerabilities.