Chapter 6: Digital Signatures with Node.js and Trust

In the previous chapter, we learned about asymmetric cryptography, also called public-key cryptography because it relies on pairs of public/private keys, and we used that to encrypt messages.

In this chapter, we'll begin by looking at public key cryptography's other main use, which is calculating digital signatures. When attached to a message (encrypted or not), these offer a guarantee that the content is intact and that the sender is indeed the person they're claiming to be. Digital signatures are the last class of cryptographic operations we'll be analyzing in this book.

Before we end this chapter, we'll also learn how to deal with the problem of trusting public keys. We'll look at some techniques that are commonly used to bind keys to a real identity, such as an individual or an organization, and why that matters.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

...