Chapter 3. Cryptography and Technical Foundations

In this chapter, you will be introduced to the concepts, theory, and practical aspects of cryptography. More focus will be given to aspects that are specifically relevant in the context of the blockchain technology. Moreover, concepts from financial markets will also be discussed in order to provide a basis for the material covered in later chapters.

You will also be introduced to the practical implementations of cryptographic algorithms so that you can experience the cryptographic functions practically. For this, the OpenSSL command line is used.

Before starting the theoretical foundations, the installation of OpenSSL is discussed in the following section so that you can do some practical work as you read through the theoretical material.

On Ubuntu Linux distribution, OpenSSL is usually already available; however, it can be installed using the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get install openssl

In the upcoming sections, first, the theoretical foundation will be discussed and then relevant practical experiments will be introduced.