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 E-Signature: 25x Faster to Sign [2026]
Type your name into a DocuSign box and the platform calls it an electronic signature. Sign a Git commit with an Ed25519 key and cryptographers call that a…
Argon2 vs bcrypt: $750K vs $40K to Crack a Password [2026]
A GPU rig that costs about $5,000 a month to rent can now try 180 billion SHA-256 guesses a second. Point the same rig at a password stored…
TLS 1.3 vs TLS 1.2: 70% Adoption, 1-RTT Handshake [2026]
Type “TLS 1.3” into Google and you will land on documentation pages, not tutorials. That is the tell. Roughly 1,900 people a month search that exact phrase, and…
ML-KEM vs ML-DSA: 1,088 vs 3,293 Bytes [2026]
The same logic applies on the signature side, though adoption trails encryption. DigiCert’s own internal migration plan pairs x25519mlkem768 for confidentiality with ML-DSA-44 for authentication on its systems,…
ChaCha20-Poly1305 vs AES-256-GCM: 3x Faster on ARM [2026]
Two authenticated encryption schemes control nearly every encrypted byte on the modern internet: ChaCha20-Poly1305 and AES-256-GCM. Both ship inside TLS 1.3. Both appear in WireGuard, Signal, and OpenSSH.…
Ed25519 vs RSA: 50x Faster, 8x Smaller Keys [2026]
Ed25519 signs a message in roughly 20 microseconds. RSA-2048 takes 667 microseconds for the same operation. That 33x speed gap, combined with signatures that are 4x smaller and…
TLS 1.3 in Node.js: 12 Steps to Secure HTTPS in 30 Min [2026]
Every HTTPS connection your Node.js server makes starts with a TLS handshake. That handshake negotiates which cipher to use, verifies the server certificate, and establishes the symmetric key…
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 cryptography decision for engineers building secure…
Symmetric vs Asymmetric Encryption: 1000x Speed Gap [2026]
Every time you open a browser, send a message, or unlock your laptop, two families of encryption algorithms are quietly dividing the work. Symmetric encryption handles the heavy…
HMAC-SHA256 in Node.js: 10 Steps, 20 Min [2026]
Every webhook your server receives is an unauthenticated HTTP request until you prove otherwise. A payment confirmation from Stripe, a push event from GitHub, an order from Shopify:…
