Articles on Cryptography

Top deep-dives on Cryptography

Off-The-Record Messaging part 1: the problem with PGP

Robert Heaton explains how PGP works, its limitations, and introduces OTR messaging as a better alternative.

Implementing a toy version of TLS 1.3

Software developer and prolific zine maker Julia Evans steps through the implementation of TLS 1.3 and provides code for you to follow along with.

A Fulcio Deep Dive

Fulcio is Sigstore's new free, community-driven Code Signing Certificate Authority, which basically provides programmers with an easier method for signing their code. Dan Lorenc's article highlights some of the similarities it shares with Let's Encrypt, what exactly Fulcio does, how it does it, and some other neat features like offline verification.

Database Cryptography Fur the Rest of Us

Soatok does a deep-dive on database cryptography, including looking at different types of databases and a case study on MongoDB.
Some highlights:

• Database cryptography is difficult because there are many different types of data that need to be protected in different ways
• Data may need to be protected in different ways depending on where it is stored within the database
• Lots of stuff, just check out the article

Some ways to use ZK-SNARKs for privacy

Vitalik Buterin focuses on answering "how do ZK-SNARKs fit into existing applications, what are some examples of what they can do, what can't they do, and what are some general guidelines for figuring out whether or not ZK-SNARKing some particular application is possible?".

Nearly Practical Verifiable Computation with a Pinocchio Virtual Machine

Federico Carrone discusses the creation of a virtual machine in Rust that implements the Pinocchio protocol.
Some highlights:

• The Pinocchio protocol is a zk-SNARKs protocol that allows for succinct proofs of circuit executions
• The objective is to prove the correct execution of a "function" on inputs, when you have 0 knowledge of those inputs
• A good bit of math here