Book Image

Building Blockchain Projects

By : Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Building Blockchain Projects

By: Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Blockchain is a decentralized ledger that maintains a continuously growing list of data records that are secured from tampering and revision. Every user is allowed to connect to the network, send new transactions to it, verify transactions, and create new blocks, making it permission-less. This book will teach you what blockchain is, how it maintains data integrity, and how to create real-world blockchain projects using Ethereum. With interesting real-world projects, you will learn how to write smart contracts which run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship, or third-party interference, and build end-to-e applications for blockchain. You will learn about concepts such as cryptography in cryptocurrencies, ether security, mining, smart contracts, solidity, and more. You will also learn about web sockets, various API services for Ethereum, and much more. The blockchain is the main technical innovation of bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for bitcoin transactions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

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...