Book Image

Advanced Blockchain Development

By : Imran Bashir, Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Advanced Blockchain Development

By: Imran Bashir, Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger with applications in industries such as finance, government, and media. This Learning Path is your guide to building blockchain networks using Ethereum, JavaScript, and Solidity. You will get started by understanding the technical foundations of blockchain technology, including distributed systems, cryptography and how this digital ledger keeps data secure. Further into the chapters, you’ll gain insights into developing applications using Ethereum and Hyperledger. As you build on your knowledge of Ether security, mining, smart contracts, and Solidity, you’ll learn how to create robust and secure applications that run exactly as programmed without being affected by fraud, censorship, or third-party interference. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll explore how blockchain solutions can be implemented in applications such as IoT apps, in addition to its use in currencies. This Learning Path also highlights how you can increase blockchain scalability, and discusses the future scope of this fascinating and powerful technology. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be equipped with the skills you need to tackle pain points encountered in the blockchain life cycle and confidently design and deploy decentralized applications.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
15
Blockchain - Outside of Currencies
16
Scalability and Other Challenges
Index

Introduction to key derivation functions


Asymmetric cryptography algorithms define the nature of their keys and how the keys should be generated because the keys need to be related. For example, the RSA key generation algorithm is deterministic.

Symmetric cryptography algorithms only define key sizes. It's up to us to generate the keys. There are various algorithms to generate these keys. One such algorithm is KDF.

A key derivation function (KDF) is a deterministic algorithm to derive a symmetric key from some secret value (such as master key, password, or passphrase). There are various types of KDFs, such as bcrypt, crypt, PBKDF2, scrypt, HKDF, and so on. You can learn more about KDFs at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_derivation_function.

Note

To generate multiple keys from a single secret value, you can concatenate a number and increment it.

A password-based key derivation function takes a password and generates a symmetric key. Due to the fact that users usually use weak passwords, password...