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

Key derivation

In all our examples so far, we've generated a new key every time by grabbing a random sequence of bytes from crypto.randomBytes. While a random key always gives the best security, in many situations we need to be able to have a memorable (or at least, human-readable) passphrase to derive the symmetric keys from.

As we mentioned previously, AES requires a 128-, 192-, or 256-bit key, which means 16, 24, or 32 bytes. You might be tempted to grab a string of 16 characters and call it a 128-bit key, such as thisismykey12345… however, that would be a really bad idea. Despite being 128 bits in length, it is only made up of lowercase letters and numbers, so its entropy is significantly lower than 128 bits: in fact, this has only about 60 bits of entropy, which means that it can be cracked relatively quickly with a brute-force attack (see Chapter 3, File and Password Hashing with Node.js, for an explanation on entropy).

However, all is not lost, and we can...