Cryptography Fundamentals Playground
If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve learned the basic cryptographic fundamentals underpinning blockchain generally. We still need to learn about decentralized consensus, and we’ll do that in the next module, but we wanted to let you interact with public key cryptography, hash functions and digital signing in a tangible way.
We’ll have a live presentation where we walk through playing with cryptographic keys and generating accounts. In the meanwhile, please check out the resources below. These are advanced exercises, but we hope you will at least take a look. If these look too intense, that’s also okay.
Additional Resources (Advanced)
- Bitcoin White Paper Exercises These are a series of exercises, built by Kyle Simpson, for understanding some of the concepts outlined in the Bitcoin white paper. These are not easy, but if you really would like to understand these fundamentals as they apply to blockchains, this is a great place to start.
- CryptoHack “A fun free platform for learning modern cryptography”
- Hack the Box A gamified, cybersecurity platform. Not cryptography, per se, but cyber security which is a related field.
- CryptoPals This is very advanced and intense, but real to-the-metal applied cryptography! I am putting this link in here and it scares me.