Explore Cryptography

Cryptography courses tend to teach three primitives back to back — symmetric, then asymmetric, then hashing — and leave you thinking they're competing options. They're not. TLS, SSH, PGP all run the same pattern underneath: asymmetric to trade a key, symmetric to move the actual data, a hash to catch tampering. You don't really understand any one of the three until you see why none of them works alone.

Nugget builds toward that through-line instead of assuming it. It sketches a block cipher applied across an image and lets you notice, before being told, why the penguin's outline survives 'encryption' — that's ECB leaking structure, and it's the fastest way to stop treating 'encrypted' as a single guarantee. From there the sessions push into where the real damage happens: CBC with no integrity check, a password database hashed with something built for speed instead of resistance, a CVE where the algorithm was fine and the key management wasn't.

None of this replaces the coursework or the crypto module you're graded on. It's the place where you argue with an AI about whether Base64 counts as encryption (it doesn't) until the distinction actually sticks.