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

Summary

In this chapter, we analyzed the last major class of cryptographic operations that we will be covering in this book – digital signatures. We've seen how they guarantee the integrity of a message, authenticate a sender, and prevent repudiation. We then saw examples of creating and validating RSA, ECDSA, and EdDSA digital signatures with Node.js.

In the second part of this chapter, we covered the problem of binding a public key to the identity of a real person or organization, and why it is significant. We looked at possible ways to address that problem, including PKI and the Web of Trust, and we learned about certificates.

Throughout this book so far, we've focused on using JavaScript in a Node.js context. The next and last section of this book will cover how to use the main cryptographic operations we've learned about inside a web browser, using JavaScript and various WebCrypto APIs.