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Dr. Elena Marchetti
Dr. Elena Marchetti writes about cryptography and the math that underpins it: hash functions, collision attacks, and why algorithms age out of trust. She has a research background in applied cryptography and tests a claim before explaining it.
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Articles by Dr. Elena Marchetti
Mullvad vs ProtonVPN: €5 Flat vs $2.99, 582 vs 15K Servers [2026]
Mullvad VPN and ProtonVPN are the two most-cited privacy-first VPN services in 2026 – but they make opposite bets on what privacy…
Luna Moth: $20M Ransom, 100+ Law Firm Attacks [2026]
Silent Ransom Group walked into US law firm offices in 2025 and 2026, plugging USB devices into workstations while posing as IT…
SHA-256 vs SHA3-256: 3.5x Speed Gap, Same 128-bit Security [2026]
Pick the wrong hash function today and you may face a painful migration before 2030. SHA-256 vs SHA3-256 is the most consequential…
Tor Browser vs VPN: Free vs $5/Month, 50x Speed Gap [2026]
Tor Browser routes your traffic through three encrypted relays and costs nothing. A commercial VPN routes your traffic through one server and…
NordVPN vs Surfshark: $3.49 vs $2.49 [2026]
Pick the cheaper VPN and you save about $12 a year. Pick the wrong one and you lose a working kill switch,…
Canvas Data Breach: 275M Hit by ShinyHunters [2026]
The largest education technology breach on record did not start with a kicked-in door. It started with a login. In late April…
Cryptographic Hash Functions Explained
A cryptographic hash function is one of the quiet workhorses of modern computing. It takes data of any size and turns it…
Digital Signatures Explained: How They Work and Why Hashes Matter
A digital signature does for electronic data what a handwritten signature and a tamper-evident seal do together for paper: it proves who…
The SHAttered SHA-1 Collision, Explained
On 23 February 2017, researchers at the Cryptology Group at CWI Amsterdam and Google Research published two different PDF files that share…
SHA-256 Explained: How It Works and Why It Matters
SHA-256 is the hash function that quietly secures most of the systems you touch every day. It signs the certificate behind the…
