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 agreements with Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman

Over the last few years, ECC has been gaining momentum as an alternative to RSA, being used in an ever-increasing number of applications and scenarios.

While RSA is considered a safe and reliable algorithm (assuming a long-enough key size is chosen and the proper precautions, such as the correct use of padding, are in place) and having been first published in 1977 it certainly falls into the category of "tried and tested" cryptosystems, there are certain advantages to ECC that make it appealing.

Algorithms based on Elliptic Curves (EC) are generally faster and use fewer resources, thus being more desirable on smaller, less powerful systems (such as IoT devices). Additionally, ECs offer the same level of security as RSA while using significantly smaller keys: a 256-bit EC key is comparable in strength to a 3,072-bit RSA key. Not only are smaller keys easier to manage, but they also produce smaller signatures (as we&apos...