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.
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…
X25519 vs P-256: 2 IETF Hybrid PQC Groups Compared [2026]
Every major browser now negotiates a post-quantum hybrid key exchange by default, and that shift has put a decades-old question back on engineering roadmaps: X25519 or P-256? The…
BLAKE3 vs SHA-256: Up to 27x Faster, No FIPS Status [2026]
Ask a systems engineer in 2026 which hash function they reach for and you’ll get two very different answers depending on the job. Ask about signing a certificate,…
SHA-1 vs SHA-256: $110K Hack vs 2^128 Security [2026]
Type sha1sum or sha256sum into a terminal today and both commands still run without complaint. That’s part of the problem. Nine years after researchers proved SHA-1 could be…
AES-256 vs RSA: 256-bit vs 112-bit Security [2026]
Ask a developer whether to encrypt a database with AES-256 or RSA and you’ll often get a confused pause. The two algorithms get compared constantly in interviews, security…
Merkle Trees vs Verkle Trees: 23x Smaller Proofs [2026]
Ethereum’s state trie has a storage problem. Every account balance, every smart contract slot, every piece of on-chain data lives inside a data structure that keeps growing, and…
ML-KEM vs X25519 TLS 1.3: 52% Adoption, +1.5ms [2026]
Cloudflare’s edge now sees roughly half of all human-generated HTTPS traffic negotiate a post-quantum key exchange, up from about 2% in March 2024. That jump happened in under…
