👋 Hello Dear Dev.to Community !

In this article I would like to share my a key-efforts I made in the entire week on my journey towards becoming a blockchain architect with deep expertise in cryptography.

This week is for me more of an organisation focused and also a relief after months of confusion (If you're willing to know more, feel free to read my self-introduction on dev.to, click here !)

Let's go now into details !

1. Define the Roadmap 🗺️

First of all I defined highly conceptual roadmap with elaborate milestones, what would I like to build in which point in time what would I like to build and so on. Of course some people will come to me and say that "it won't be so easy as you imagine etc.", on what I answer: "I know and thus attach this lovely image <3"

A lot of people, especially newbies treat the roadmap as some holy grail and clinge to it as strict as they can, which should not actually be so.

Personally, I treat roadmap as an guide + quite optimistic prediction on the learning process and I will not beat myself up for not succeeding it 100% (I used to as I was in web-dev). So my advice ? Take it easy, but not loosely.

2. Define the work-rules 📃

Again the same case as with roadmap, but this time it's general set of instructions to follow and not to follow with included unwilling behaviour. I used to have a lot of issues with concentration/focus throughout my entire journey, so I finally have broken my ego and pointed out: "Yes, I suck in that field".

3. Filling Gaps on DSA 📝

As I entered the programming space, I actually never saw a purpose on using DSA in web-dev, coz mostly DB (Database, not Deutsche Bank or Bahn, lol) providers have internal sorting algos and methods to offer to you to implement them. And I really skipped that part of coding, however it's essential for cryptography so I currently practiced and learned the sorting algorithms (only one left, from a course I made).

4. Official Farewell with Web-dev 🫡

As I decided not to do web-dev and smart-contracts profesionally as my main career focus, I want to make farewell with this period in my life with high respects. Thus I decided to send application for Web3-Hackathon and hopefully I will be accepted and will able to participate in my first hackathon. I do it not to win, but more for connections and experience the spirit of hackathon the vibe, attitude.

5. Starting a project for practice of understanding of cryptographic components (ciphers, hash-functions etc.) 🧠

I have started a project in typescript, before I start learning Rust Click here to checkout

This is a library that contains every cipher from "Understanding Cryptography" Book made by Christof Paar. If you want to enter cryptography, This Gentleman will do it much easier, I really wish I met him irl :D

I already implemented the most secure cipher in the world, simultaneously the most useless cipher in the world namely OTP.

BONUS: What is OTP ?

OTP stands for One time pad has been discovered by Gilbert Vernam in 1917, although it was used yet in end of 19th century for telegraphy security. This cipher is so called symmetric cipher, but more on it in a separate article, what that means.

OTP in order to be functional must fullfil those 4 conditions:

• The key must be at least as long as the plaintext.


• The key must be truly random (so it cannot be generated from Math.random(). In my approach I actually used the build in crypto.getRandomValues() method, although it seems to be CSPRNG instead of TRNG)


• The key must never be reused in whole or in part.


• The key must be kept completely secret by the communicating parties.

So imagine this you send a message that is 512MB large, whatever file, movie, game does not matter. You encrypt it and send the key to your receiver together with the cipher text it's 1GB of just one-time used data, thus OTP is useless.

How does OTP work ?

Encryption:

ciphertext = x XOR key

Decryption:

plaintext = ciphertext XOR key

But what is XOR ? XOR is a special operation that basically looks following way:

n-th bit of x + n-th bit of key modulo 2

so now converting 512MB to bits it's about 4 294 967 297 bits to be XORed through and thus is the cipher useless.

Thank you for reading my article 😍

So I hope I brought you a little bit of cryptographic sneak-peak, so that you will be thrilled for next updates. As an offtopic,

Yesterday was 30th Pokemon Anniversary, so here see how would look like a Pokemon Trainer if he would be a privacy-first 😅.

Btw, it's me 😁. I do not uncover my face in the internet, due to again fact because it's against my personal privacy-policy.

You want to connect ? 👥

Go to my website from this link and click Telegram or Signal link (I'm privacy first guy as you see)

Happy, Productive and Successful weekend, see you in a week !