Everything tagged Development.
How file integrity checks work — comparing hashes to verify a download is intact, how to check on each OS, and accidental vs deliberate tampering.
AZ Utils Editorial · · 11 min read
Why MD5 is no longer secure — the broken collision resistance, how the attacks work, real incidents like Flame, and what to use instead.
AZ Utils Editorial · · 11 min read
Checksums explained — what they are, how they detect errors, CRC vs cryptographic checksums, checksum vs hash, and their limits.
AZ Utils Editorial · · 11 min read
SHA-256 explained — what a cryptographic hash is, its key properties, why it is not encryption, where it is used, and the password caveat.
AZ Utils Editorial · · 11 min read
How SHA-256 works step by step — padding, 512-bit blocks, the message schedule, 64 compression rounds and why its properties emerge.
AZ Utils Editorial · · 11 min read
Password hashing best practices — why fast hashes like SHA-256 fail, and how to use slow, salted functions like Argon2, bcrypt and scrypt correctly.
AZ Utils Editorial · · 12 min read
A survey of modern cryptographic hashes — SHA-2, SHA-3, BLAKE, password hashes, HMAC and deprecated MD5/SHA-1 — and how to choose the right one.
AZ Utils Editorial · · 11 min read
URL encoding explained — percent-encoding, reserved vs unreserved characters, %20 vs +, UTF-8 handling, code examples and common mistakes.
AZ Utils Editorial · · 12 min read
A practical reference of common URL encodings — space, &, ?, /, #, +, %, Unicode and emoji — with what each becomes and real-world examples.
AZ Utils Editorial · · 10 min read
