Book Image

Essential Cryptography for JavaScript Developers

By : Alessandro Segala
Book Image

Essential Cryptography for JavaScript Developers

By: Alessandro 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)
1
Part 1 – Getting Started
4
Part 2 – Using Common Cryptographic Operations with Node.js
9
Part 3 – Cryptography in the Browser

Technical requirements

All the code samples for this chapter can be found in this book's GitHub repository at https://bit.ly/crypto-ch7.

Playground

To make it easier to build and test the code samples in these last two chapters, which often include third-party modules from npm, we have set up a "playground" that runs within your browser. You can access it at https://bit.ly/crypto-playground.

In Node.js

While this chapter and the next will be referring to JavaScript code written for web browsers, the same APIs have been made available in Node.js as a compatibility layer since version 15, released in October 2020.

In Node.js, the Web Crypto APIs are available in the webcrypto object in the crypto module.

For example, take this snippet of JavaScript code for the browser, which we'll be covering later in this chapter:

window.crypto.getRandomValues(array)

To use it in Node.js (15+), change from window.crypto to the webcrypto object, which...