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Essential Cryptography for JavaScript Developers

Essential Cryptography for JavaScript Developers

By : Segala
5 (5)
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Essential Cryptography for JavaScript Developers

Essential Cryptography for JavaScript Developers

5 (5)
By: Segala

Overview of this book

If you’re a software developer, this book will give you an introduction to cryptography, helping you understand how to make the most of it for your applications. The book contains extensive code samples in JavaScript, both for Node.js and for frontend apps running in a web browser, although the core concepts can be used by developers working with any programming language and framework. With a purely hands-on approach that is focused on sharing actionable knowledge, you’ll learn about the common categories of cryptographic operations that you can leverage in all apps you’re developing, including hashing, encryption with symmetric, asymmetric and hybrid ciphers, and digital signatures. You’ll learn when to use these operations and how to choose and implement the most popular algorithms to perform them, including SHA-2, Argon2, AES, ChaCha20-Poly1305, RSA, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Later, you’ll learn how to deal with password and key management. All code in this book is written in JavaScript and designed to run in Node.js or as part of frontend apps for web browsers. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build solutions that leverage cryptography to protect user privacy, offer better security against an expanding and more complex threat landscape, help meet data protection requirements, and unlock new opportunities.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
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1
Part 1 – Getting Started
4
Part 2 – Using Common Cryptographic Operations with Node.js
9
Part 3 – Cryptography in the Browser

Hashing passwords and deriving keys

As we saw in the previous section, passwords have a low entropy, so when you need to hash them so that they can be stored in a database or when you want to derive encryption keys from them, you should be using deliberately slow hashing functions.

In a world where computers continue to get faster and developers strive to create applications that run in less time and use fewer resources, the existence of an entire field of research around creating purposely slow algorithms may feel odd. Yet, in the field of hashing functions, there's a whole class of algorithms (sometimes called Key Derivation Functions (KDFs) in this case) that are designed to do just that.

Among all the various KDFs, we will be looking specifically at two: Argon2 and scrypt. These are designed to be slow, with a configurable "cost" for each invocation, and they aim to make it harder to use hardware accelerators such as GPUs or FPGAs.

The Case for Leveraging...

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