Chapter 4: Symmetric Encryption in Node.js
If you stopped a random person on the street and asked them what is the first thing that comes to their mind when they think of cryptography, chances are they'd talk about encrypting their data and protecting it with a password or PIN. This class of operations is called symmetric encryption, and it's arguably the most widely known, even among not particularly tech-savvy consumers.
In Chapter 3, File and Password Hashing with Node.js, we began looking at classes of cryptographic operations. starting with hashing functions, and we explained how they're different from encryption. While hashing is a one-way operation, encryption is reversible: you can obtain the plaintext back from an encrypted message (also called ciphertext).
In this chapter, we'll look at data encryption using symmetric algorithms, specifically AES and ChaCha20-Poly1305, by covering the following topics:
- The difference between symmetric and...
