Tag
8 articles with this tag.
BLS signatures use a bilinear pairing on the curve BLS12-381 to make short, deterministic signatures that can be added together into one. Learn how a pairing works, how a message is hashed to a curve, how aggregation saves space, and how a rogue key attack is stopped.
39 min read
ECDSA is the elliptic curve version of DSA, used to sign TLS handshakes and Bitcoin transactions. Learn how signing and verifying work, why a repeated nonce reveals the private key, how RFC 6979 removes that risk, and how a signature is encoded.
23 min read
XMSS and LMS sign with nothing but a hash function, so quantum computers do not break them. Learn how Winternitz chains and Merkle trees work, why a signer must never reuse a one-time key, and how a reused key lets an attacker forge a message.
34 min read
DSA was the U.S. government's answer to a simple question: how do you prove a message came from you, without RSA's patent? Learn how the Digital Signature Algorithm works, and why a single reused number sank Sony's PS3 security.
9 min read
Schnorr signatures are what DSA might have been if a 20-year patent hadn't gotten in the way. Simpler, provably secure, and now at the heart of Bitcoin's Taproot upgrade: here's how they work.
8 min read
ECC gets RSA-level security from far smaller keys. Here's the curve math behind it, and why it now powers most of the web.
13 min read
ElGamal turns Diffie-Hellman key exchange into full public-key encryption. Here's how the discrete-log problem protects every message it sends.
7 min read
EdDSA replaced random nonces with deterministic ones, closing off one of ECDSA's worst failure modes. Here's the math behind Ed25519.
8 min read
