Blockchain Consensus: Byzantine Agreement in Adversarial Networks
Tracing the impossibility results that define what blockchain consensus can and cannot guarantee
Authenticated Encryption: Why Encrypt-Then-MAC Wins
The composition order of encryption and authentication is a provable security boundary, not a design preference
Hash Function Security: Beyond Collision Resistance
Understanding when collision resistance isn't enough and what properties your construction actually requires
Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Proving Everything While Revealing Nothing
How completeness, soundness, and simulation enable proofs that verify everything while revealing absolutely nothing
The Random Oracle Model: Useful Fiction in Cryptographic Proofs
Why cryptographers trust proofs built on objects that provably cannot exist
Side-Channel Attacks: When Mathematics Isn't Enough
Your algorithm is unbreakable—but your implementation whispers secrets through timing, power, and electromagnetic emanations.
Pairing-Based Cryptography: Bilinear Maps Enable New Primitives
How bilinear maps enable identity-based encryption and cryptographic primitives that classical discrete logarithm systems cannot construct
Differential Privacy: Mathematical Guarantees for Data Protection
Understanding the epsilon-delta framework that makes provable data privacy possible—and the fundamental limits it cannot escape.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography: Why Curves Beat Integers
The mathematical structure that makes 256-bit keys outperform 3072-bit alternatives in cryptographic security
Formal Verification in Cryptography: Proving Code Correct
How theorem provers turn cryptographic implementations into mathematical theorems that happen to execute
Threshold Cryptography: Distributing Trust Without Single Points of Failure
How polynomial mathematics eliminates the trusted key holder and makes cryptographic compromise require coordinated attacks across distributed parties.
Merkle Trees: Efficient Integrity Verification at Scale
How binary tree geometry transforms billion-element verification into thirty-step computations
Multi-Party Computation: Joint Computation Without Mutual Trust
How secret sharing and oblivious transfer enable mutually distrustful parties to compute joint functions while provably revealing nothing but results
Oblivious Transfer: The Minimum Assumption for Secure Computation
Understanding why this deceptively simple primitive serves as the universal foundation for all secure multi-party computation protocols.
Homomorphic Encryption: Computing on Ciphertexts
How cryptographers conquered the noise barrier to enable computation without decryption—and why your scheme choice determines your success
The Subtle Art of Cryptographic Protocol Design: Why Composition Fails
Understanding why provably secure components fail when combined reveals the hidden assumptions that break real-world cryptographic systems.
Key Derivation Functions: Extracting Cryptographic Strength
From raw entropy to cryptographic keys: understanding extraction, expansion, and why password derivation demands fundamentally different mathematics.
Garbled Circuits: Computing on Encrypted Functions
How Yao's 1986 construction enables computing any function on private inputs while revealing only the final result through encrypted Boolean circuits.
Why Post-Quantum Cryptography Demands Rethinking Every Security Assumption
Quantum computers obsolete classical cryptography entirely—here's how lattice mathematics and cryptographic agility preserve security in the post-quantum era.
Cryptographic Commitment Schemes: Binding Without Revealing
Master how cryptographic commitments achieve the impossible—binding to secrets while revealing nothing until you choose.