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

Please refer to the Technical requirements section of Chapter 7, Introduction to Cryptography in the Browser, since the technical requirements are the same for this chapter too.

In particular, please note that all the samples in this chapter have been optimized so that they can be included in modern browser-based applications that are packaged using a bundler for JavaScript code, such as Webpack or similar. Alternatively, the code can also be executed in Node.js 15 or higher by importing the compatibility object from the crypto package.

To make it easier to experiment with the code shown in this chapter, we've created a "playground" that you can run within your web browser: https://bit.ly/crypto-playground.

As a reminder, all the code samples for this chapter and the previous can be found in this book's GitHub repository at https://bit.ly/crypto-ch8.

Lastly, please note that some code samples depend on libraries to convert from...