Introduction to Digital Signature for the Working Developer

In this post, we would be looking at digital signatures. It will be a quick, straight-to-the-point overview of some of the essential things a developer should know about digital signatures. How to think about them and what problems they solve. It is targeted at the working developer who needs to be familiar enough with digital signatures to use them, but who does not need to know the gory details of how they are implemented, or how they work internally.

This post contains the following sections: 

1. What is a digital signature 
2. Components of Digital Signature Schemes 
3. Digital Signature Algorithms 
4. Last note: Digital Signatures versus Message Authenticated Codes.

Introduction to Asymmetric Encryption for the Working Developer

In this post, we are going to look at asymmetric encryption. As mentioned in the previous post on symmetric encryption, encryption is the cryptographic primitive that guarantees confidentiality, by which we mean the ability for two or more authorized parties to communicate, without an unauthorized person being able to decipher the messages being communicated.

In symmetric encryption, both parties need to use the same key for encryption and decryption. This leads to the problem of how to securely get the communicating parties to use the same key. A solution to this is the Key exchange protocol that was discussed in Introduction to Key Exchange for the Working Developer

Asymmetric encryption is different. Unlike symmetric encryption, it does not have the requirement that the same key needs to be used for encryption and decryption. Hence why it is called asymmetric. It makes use of key pairs instead. One is called the private key, the other called the public key.

In this post, we will be looking at how to use asymmetric encryption and what other general information to be aware of. As always it is targeted at the working developer who needs a grounded understanding of these cryptographic primitives without necessarily covering the internals of these primitives.