Cryptography

A MAC (Message Authentication Code) is used to sign a message with a shared key. This differs from public key signing which uses a private key to sign and a public key to verify. In the following figure, Bob has a message and creates an HMAC-SHA-256 message authentication code using…

The US government defines a number of standards that many companies comply with, and one of the strongest is FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140. This standard defines a number of levels that define the security level of a product/system and includes modules tested within the Cryptography Module Validation Program…

We are increasingly moving into the public cloud for our security, and often need to use public key encryption (asymmetric key) to encrypt and decrypt data. Basically, for this, we create a key pair: a public key and a private key. One of these keys is used to encrypt, and…

In digital signing, we use our private key to sign for a message, and then the proof of signing is done with our public key. This happens for a Bitcoin transaction, and where we take the private key from our wallet and then sign for a transaction. …

After Heartbleed there were some serious questions asked of OpenSSL. How could something so fundamental to the security of the Internet to allows to be run from old code? How could a library that was so important to trust on the Internet be maintained by just a few part-time people…