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.
Digital Signature vs Certificate: 47-Day Cutoff [2026]
Type “digital signature vs digital certificate” into a search bar and you will find thousands of explainers that blur the two terms together. That confusion has a real…
Scrypt vs bcrypt: $37K vs $1,480 to Crack a Password [2026]
Password hashing rarely makes headlines, but it quietly decides how expensive a breach becomes. When a database of hashed passwords leaks, the algorithm behind those hashes determines whether…
BLAKE3 vs SHA-3: 12x Faster, Lacks FIPS Status [2026]
Two hash functions, both blessed by serious cryptographers, both still shipping in production code in October 2026, and both solving the same basic problem in almost opposite ways.…
TLS 1.3 vs mTLS: Same 1-RTT, $400/Mo CA Cost [2026]
Every HTTPS connection on the internet runs on one-way TLS: your browser checks the server’s certificate, and that’s it. The server never asks who you are. Mutual TLS,…
AES-256-GCM vs Ascon: NIST Standard Cuts Code 2 Ways [2026]
On August 13, 2025, the National Institute of Standards and Technology quietly closed out a 50-year run. NIST Special Publication 800-232 made Ascon, not a descendant of AES,…
AES-CTR vs AES-GCM: 2.23 vs 0.17 Cycles/Byte [2026]
Pick the wrong AES mode and you don’t get a slow app. You get a cipher that happily decrypts ciphertext an attacker has tampered with, no error, no…
BLAKE3 vs BLAKE2: 4x Faster, 140 GiB/s [2026]
Cryptographic hashing has two live generations fighting for the same job today. BLAKE2, standardized in IETF RFC 7693 back in 2012, still runs inside Argon2, WireGuard, and libsodium.…
RSA vs ML-DSA: 256 vs 2,420-Byte Signatures [2026]
RSA has signed the internet’s certificates for three decades. ML-DSA, finalized by NIST in August 2024, is the algorithm built to take over once quantum computers make RSA’s…
LMS vs XMSS: 1,432 vs 2,500-Byte Signatures [2026]
Every major post-quantum migration story in 2026 centers on ML-KEM and ML-DSA, the lattice-based algorithms NIST finalized in August 2024. But there’s a second, quieter category of quantum-resistant…
SSL vs TLS: TLS 1.3 Hits 72% Share, SSL at 0% [2026]
Type “SSL certificate” into a browser’s address bar settings and you will still find the phrase everywhere, from hosting dashboards to email marketing banners promising a “free SSL”…
