Security

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.

Cryptography Course Released on Boot.dev

Jan 24, 2023 by Lane Wagner

Greetings! We’re excited to announce that we’ve unveiled a brand-new cryptography course on Boot.dev. We’re convinced that this new experience is truly one of a kind.

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.

They Who Control Encryption

Aug 12, 2020 by Lane Wagner

If you’ve seen The Imitation Game or studied computer science in school, you have likely heard of Enigma, Alan Turing, or some of the other advances in cryptography that took place during the Second World War.

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.

JWT Authentication in Golang

Feb 20, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Go is becoming very popular for backend web development, and JWT’s are one of the most popular ways to handle authentication on API requests.

How Do Brute-Force Attackers Know They Found The Key?

Feb 11, 2020 by Lane Wagner

To “Brute Force” something (when talking about computers) means to systematically try every possible combination until you find the right answer.

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.