Cryptography
Deep-dives into the maths that secures the internet: hash functions, digital signatures, the SHA family and the SHAttered collision that gave this site its name. Explainers and reporting for people who want to understand how the primitives actually work.
X25519 vs P-256: 2 IETF Hybrid PQC Groups Compared [2026]
Every major browser now negotiates a post-quantum hybrid key exchange by default, and that shift has put a decades-old question back on engineering roadmaps: X25519 or P-256? The…
BLAKE3 vs SHA-256: Up to 27x Faster, No FIPS Status [2026]
Ask a systems engineer in 2026 which hash function they reach for and you’ll get two very different answers depending on the job. Ask about signing a certificate,…
SHA-1 vs SHA-256: $110K Hack vs 2^128 Security [2026]
Type sha1sum or sha256sum into a terminal today and both commands still run without complaint. That’s part of the problem. Nine years after researchers proved SHA-1 could be…
AES-256 vs RSA: 256-bit vs 112-bit Security [2026]
Ask a developer whether to encrypt a database with AES-256 or RSA and you’ll often get a confused pause. The two algorithms get compared constantly in interviews, security…
Merkle Trees vs Verkle Trees: 23x Smaller Proofs [2026]
Ethereum’s state trie has a storage problem. Every account balance, every smart contract slot, every piece of on-chain data lives inside a data structure that keeps growing, and…
ML-KEM vs X25519 TLS 1.3: 52% Adoption, +1.5ms [2026]
Cloudflare’s edge now sees roughly half of all human-generated HTTPS traffic negotiate a post-quantum key exchange, up from about 2% in March 2024. That jump happened in under…
zk-SNARKs vs zk-STARKs: 384 Bytes vs 68KB Proofs [2026]
Every rollup team building on Ethereum in 2026 eventually hits the same fork in the road: prove transactions with zk-SNARKs or prove them with zk-STARKs. The two families…
ECC vs RSA: 25x Faster Signing, Smaller Keys [2026]
Every TLS handshake, SSH login, and Bitcoin transaction depends on a choice made decades ago: RSA or elliptic curve cryptography. In 2026 that choice is no longer settled…
ML-DSA vs SLH-DSA: 2.4KB vs 7.8KB Signatures [2026]
NIST finalized two post-quantum digital signature standards in August 2024, and by August 2026 the choice between them has become a real engineering decision rather than a theoretical…
ML-KEM vs RSA: 1,184-Byte Keys, 52% Web Adoption [2026]
RSA has secured internet traffic since 1977. That run has an expiration date now. On August 13, 2024, NIST finalized FIPS 203, turning the lattice-based algorithm known as…
