shattered.io
The first practical SHA-1 collision
Phishing Attacks: How to Recognize and Avoid Them
The most reliable way into someone’s account is often the simplest: just ask for the keys, convincingly. That is phishing. Rather than defeating encryption or cracking a password,…
Password Security: What Actually Keeps Accounts Safe
Passwords are the front door to almost everything you do online, and most of the advice people carry around about them is years out of date. The old…
Online Security Explained: A Practical Guide
Online security is the set of habits, tools, and technologies that keep your accounts, your data, and your devices out of the wrong hands. Most people meet it…
HTTPS and TLS Explained: What the Padlock Really Means
Every time you see https and a small padlock at the start of a web address, a quiet piece of cryptography is at work protecting your connection. Most…
Data Breaches: How They Happen and How to Protect Yourself
A data breach is what happens when information that was supposed to stay private ends up in the hands of someone who should not have it. The information…
Cryptographic Hash Functions Explained
A cryptographic hash function is one of the quiet workhorses of modern computing. It takes data of any size and turns it into a short, fixed-length fingerprint, and…
Digital Signatures Explained: How They Work and Why Hashes Matter
A digital signature does for electronic data what a handwritten signature and a tamper-evident seal do together for paper: it proves who created something and shows that nobody…
The SHAttered SHA-1 Collision, Explained
On 23 February 2017, researchers at the Cryptology Group at CWI Amsterdam and Google Research published two different PDF files that share the same SHA-1 hash. The digest…
SHA-256 Explained: How It Works and Why It Matters
SHA-256 is the hash function that quietly secures most of the systems you touch every day. It signs the certificate behind the padlock in your browser, fingerprints the…
Hashing and Cryptography Explained
Cryptography is the science of protecting information so that only the intended parties can read it, verify it, or trust where it came from. It powers nearly everything…
