cryptography

8 articles · All tags

• Prime Numbers and the Sieve of Eratosthenes
  A prime has exactly two divisors, 1 and itself. Learn why primes never run out, how the ancient Sieve of Eratosthenes finds them, and why they secure the internet.
• How TLS Works: The HTTPS Handshake Explained
  TLS encrypts web traffic using a handshake that authenticates the server with a certificate and agrees on fresh keys. See how HTTPS keeps connections private.
• Zero-Knowledge Proofs
  Zero-knowledge proofs: prove a statement is true without revealing why — interactive protocols, zk-SNARKs, blockchain rollups, and private logins explained.
• Bitcoin and Proof of Work
  How Bitcoin achieves consensus without a central authority: hash chains, mining difficulty, and the energy cost that secures double-spend resistance.
• The Voynich Manuscript
  An early-15th-century illustrated codex written in an unknown script that no one has convincingly deciphered — what it contains, what has been ruled out, and why it resists.
• Euler's Totient Function
  The function φ(n) counting the integers between 1 and n that are coprime to n, a cornerstone of modular arithmetic and the basis of RSA encryption.
• Hash Functions
  Deterministic functions that map arbitrary data to fixed-size digests, used for integrity checking, password storage, and digital signatures.
• Public-Key Cryptography
  Cryptography with paired public and private keys, enabling encryption and digital signatures without shared secrets.