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

Chapter 3: File and Password Hashing with Node.js

In Chapter 1, Cryptography for Developers, we introduced and listed all the cryptographic operations we'll be analyzing, including hashing, symmetric and asymmetric encryption, and digital signatures. In this chapter, we shall dive straight into the first of those: hashing.

Among the various classes of operations we'll be looking at in this book, hashing is possibly the most used one. Chances are you are already familiar with hashing at least to a degree, likely having used functions such as MD5, SHA-1, or those in the SHA-2 family previously.

Hashing's widespread and mainstream adoption in computing is a consequence of the many ways it can be used. As we'll see in this chapter, these functions help solve a wide variety of problems, including calculating checksums and verifying the integrity of documents, deriving encryption keys, storing passwords, and more.

Throughout this chapter, we'll be learning...