Cryptography, Programming, and Security Articles
Lane Wagner 
By Lane Wagner Bitcoin improvement proposal 32 is, in my opinion, one of the most important BIPs we have. (Thanks Peter Wuille!) BIP 32 gave us Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets. That is, the ability to create a tree of keys from a single seed. In the early days of Bitcoin, each time a user wanted to … Read more BIP 32 Watch-Only Wallets
In the wake of the hearings about Facebook’s new Libra blockchain, it is more important than ever that we all understand the difference between trustworthy and trustless apps. A trustworthy app is an app whose developers are known and trusted by the community. The developer’s reputations and businesses are on the line, so it motivates … Read more Trustworthy vs Trustless Apps
By Lane Wagner We recently integrated Snyk into Qvault as a way to get more visibility into known vulnerabilities in Qvault’s code base. Snyk has already patched a critical vulnerability in lodash for us. This allowed us to continue releasing new versions before the official fix for lodash was published a few days ago. We … Read more Snyk Security Review
With quantum computers getting more powerful every year, many worry about the safety of modern encryption standards. As quantum computers improve in performance and the number of qubits used for calculations increases, current cryptosystems are under more threat of attack. What will break? Many asymmetric encryption algorithms have been mathematically proven to be broken by … Read more Is AES-256 Quantum Resistant?
Qvault is a new opensource password manager, with an emphasis on user experience and customization options. Many who stumble upon Qvault ask the following, “How is this different from other password managers?” In this article we explain what sets Qvault apart. 1. Open Source Many password managers that exist today do not publish their code … Read more Intro to Qvault
Randomness is a hard problem for computers. For this reason most functions that generate randomness are not considered cryptographically secure. That means that it is possible that an attacker can take a good guess at what number a non-secure randomness generator generated. How can randomness be attacked? Many non-secure randomness (or entropy) generators would do … Read more Randomness and Entropy in Node and Electron
Secrets. You certainly have many and I don’t mean stretching the truth to a first date about interests and hobbies or being into My Little Pony as a forty-year-old man. I’m talking about digital secrets. Social security numbers, passwords, pin codes, cryptocurrency keys, credit cards, and bank account numbers, for instance, define our online personas … Read more You can’t function in 2019 without a password manager
This will be a basic introduction to the Scrypt hash function, or more accurately, KDF function. I will assume most of my audience is here to gain an understanding of why Scrypt is used and the basics of how it works. My goal is to explain it in a general sense, I will be omitting … Read more (Very) Basic Intro to the Scrypt Hash
Qvault’s dual encryption allows users to require that two keys are needed to unlock their vault. A password, and a key card. You have probably heard of two factor authentication. According to Authy: 2FA is an extra layer of security used to make sure that people trying to gain access to an online account are who they … Read more Dual Encryption