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.
Merkle vs Verkle Trees: 1KB to 150-Byte Proofs [2026]
Ethereum’s state currently lives in a hexary Merkle Patricia Trie, a structure that traces back to the network’s 2015 launch. For years, the plan to replace it centered…
Zero-Knowledge Proofs vs MPC: 68x Faster, $16T [2026]
Two cryptographic tools keep showing up in the same sentence this year, and most explanations still muddle them together. Zero-knowledge proofs let one party convince another that a…
Elliptic Curve Cryptography vs RSA: 14x Faster [2026]
Every time a browser loads a padlock icon, a phone unlocks with a passkey, or a Bitcoin wallet signs a transaction, one of two aging mathematical ideas is…
Ed25519 vs X25519: One Curve, 108% Faster Signing [2026]
Every SSH key you generate with ssh-keygen -t ed25519 and every WireGuard tunnel that comes up in under a second rests on the same 255-bit curve. But Ed25519…
AES-GCM vs AES-CCM: 12% Faster, One Pass Not Two [2026]
Pick the wrong AES mode for a constrained radio chip and you burn silicon you don’t have. Pick the wrong one for a TLS-terminating load balancer and you…
MD5 vs SHA-256: SHA-256 Is Now 4x Faster [2026]
MD5 should have been retired years ago. It still shows up in build scripts, legacy databases, and dedup caches across production systems in 2026, mostly because nobody wants…
HMAC vs CMAC: 2x Speed Gap, One 128-Bit Ceiling [2026]
Every time a server checks whether an API request, a webhook payload, or a firmware update was tampered with in transit, it leans on one of two workhorses:…
RSA vs ML-KEM: Post-Quantum Encryption Adds 30x Data [2026]
Every TLS handshake, every SSH login, and every signed software update on the internet today leans on math that a large enough quantum computer could break. That is…
AES-GCM vs AES-GCM-SIV: 48% Slower, Nonce-Safe [2026]
A single reused nonce can hand an attacker the keys to an entire AES-GCM session. That is not a theoretical footnote. RFC 9325 names four real CVEs tied…
ZK Proofs vs Homomorphic Encryption: 68x Speed Gap [2026]
Two cryptographic tools promise to let you compute on private data without exposing it, and they get confused constantly. Zero-knowledge proofs let you prove a statement is true…
