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.
ML-KEM vs NTRU: 1,568 vs 1,230-Byte Keys [2026]
A ransomware crew calling itself “Kyber” spent the spring of 2026 doing something no criminal group had done before: encrypting victim data with a NIST-standardized post-quantum algorithm. According…
ML-KEM vs HQC: NIST’s Backup Adds 4x the Compute [2026]
NIST spent nine years picking a lattice-based algorithm called ML-KEM to protect the internet from quantum computers, then turned around in March 2025 and picked a second one…
SHA-256 vs SHA-3: 3.3x Faster, Same Security [2026]
Pick a hash function for a new system in 2026 and you will eventually land on the same fork in the road: SHA-256, the workhorse behind Bitcoin and…
Curve25519 vs secp256k1: 18% Faster Signature Checks [2026]
Every Bitcoin transaction and every Signal message leans on an elliptic curve to prove who signed what. They are not the same curve, and the difference is not…
PBKDF2 vs Argon2: Argon2id Is 22x Harder to Crack [2026]
Every password stored anywhere eventually runs through a key derivation function, and in 2026 that function is almost always either PBKDF2 or Argon2. Both turn a human-memorable password…
SHA-256 vs SHA-512: 60% Faster on 64-Bit CPUs [2026]
Pick the wrong hash function for a 64-bit server fleet and you can leave real throughput on the table. SHA-256 and SHA-512 come from the same NIST family,…
HMAC vs SHA-256: Why 2x CPU Cost Buys Real Auth [2026]
Type “HMAC vs SHA-256” into a search bar and you’ll find a wall of half-answers, mostly from Q&A threads where someone half-remembers a security course from 2015. That…
RSA Key Exchange vs ECDHE: 2.4x Faster, TLS Drops It [2026]
Security engineers spent the summer of 2026 ripping RSA key exchange out of their TLS 1.2 configurations. The trigger: an IETF draft that formally deprecates RSA and finite-field…
FN-DSA vs ML-DSA: 666-Byte Sigs, 2-Yr Standards Gap [2026]
Two algorithms sit on NIST’s shortlist for post-quantum digital signatures, and only one of them actually has a finished standard. ML-DSA, the lattice scheme derived from CRYSTALS-Dilithium, became…
AES-128 vs AES-256: 39% Speed Gap, Same NIST Approval [2026]
AES-128 and AES-256 both sit inside the same cipher, share the same round structure, and pass the same NIST scrutiny. Yet the choice between them still shows up…
