Summary

In this chapter, we learned about two important topics that are key to using cryptographic functions. First, we learned about the most common encodings for textual strings and binary data that we'll use throughout the book, and we looked at the first code samples using the Buffer module in Node.js. We then explored the importance of random numbers in cryptography and learned how to generate cryptographically secure random byte sequences with Node.js.

In the next chapter, we'll start with the first class of cryptographic operations: hashing. We'll learn about how hashing differs from encryption, what it's used for, and how to hash strings, files, and stream data with Node.js. We'll also look at a few different hashing algorithms and how to pick the right one for each scenario.