https://medium.com/@thomas_40553/how-to-secure-encrypt-and-…
https://medium.com/@thomas_40553/how-to-secure-encrypt-and-decrypt-data-within-the-browser-with-aes-gcm-and-pbkdf2-057b839c96b6
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The Ultimate Developer’s Guide to AES-GCM: Encrypt and Decrypt with JavaScript and the Web Cryptography API
Hey developers 👋,
ever wondered about how secure your application really is? This guide will show you how to leverage the Web Cryptography API to protect your data effectively, focusing on AES-GCM encryption. We’ll break down the essentials of key management, encryption processes, and integrity checks, giving you a straightforward path to robust data security. Ready to elevate your security approach? Let’s dive in.
We will use the Web Cryptography API because it provides secure, standards-based methods for generating keys, hashing, signing, encrypting and decrypting data built directly into browsers. This enables a wide range of cryptographic operations that are essential for modern web applications. For the encryption algorithm, we’ll use AES-GCM, which is known for its efficiency and security.
AES-GCM (Advanced Encryption Standard — Galois/Counter Mode) is a symmetric key encryption algorithm that inherently requires a key to encrypt and decrypt data. The key could technically be any string. However, for enhanced security and to ensure data is secured with an additional password, we use PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2) for key derivation. PBKDF2 takes a password as input and produces a cryptographic key. It incorporates a salt to prevent rainbow table attacks and can perform many iterations to increase the computation time, thereby enhancing resistance against brute-force attacks.
Understanding Encryption: How It All Works
Before we deep dive into each component, let’s look at the process shown above and summarize the relevant components involved in securing data:
Key Derivation
Directly using user passwords as encryption keys is not advisable due to their predictability and vulnerability to being guessed or cracked through brute-force attacks. Instead, we use a key derivation process to transform these potentially weak passwords into stron…