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.
bcrypt Password Hashing in Node.js: 11 Steps [2026]
bcrypt remains the most widely deployed password hashing function in the Node.js ecosystem, and in 2026 it still earns its place. The OWASP Password Storage Cheat Sheet lists…
RSA Encryption in Node.js: 11 Steps [2026]
RSA encryption turns 49 years old in 2026, and it still protects a large share of the TLS handshakes, signed software updates, and API tokens you touch every…
Hashing vs Encryption: Fixed 256-Bit Output, No Key [2026]
Ask a junior developer to “encrypt” a password and you can watch a security incident take shape in real time. Hashing and encryption both scramble data into something…
AES-256 Encryption in Node.js: 12 Steps [2026]
AES encryption protects more data on the planet than any other cipher, and most of it runs through code that gets the details wrong. A 96-bit nonce reused…
Argon2 Password Hashing in Node.js: 11 Steps [2026]
Passwords still protect most of the internet, and most applications still store them badly. If your Node.js app hashes passwords with plain SHA-256, an unsalted MD5, or even…
Cryptographic Hash Functions Explained
A cryptographic hash function is one of the quiet workhorses of modern computing. It takes data of any size and turns it into a short, fixed-length fingerprint, and…
Digital Signatures Explained: How They Work and Why Hashes Matter
A digital signature does for electronic data what a handwritten signature and a tamper-evident seal do together for paper: it proves who created something and shows that nobody…
The SHAttered SHA-1 Collision, Explained
On 23 February 2017, researchers at the Cryptology Group at CWI Amsterdam and Google Research published two different PDF files that share the same SHA-1 hash. The digest…
SHA-256 Explained: How It Works and Why It Matters
SHA-256 is the hash function that quietly secures most of the systems you touch every day. It signs the certificate behind the padlock in your browser, fingerprints the…
