Series
Trust
How trust works in the digital world -- from identity and encryption to certificates and reputation. The systems that let strangers do business without shaking hands. Part of Under the Hood.
Under the Hood · Trust
Why Trust Is Hard
The fundamental problem of the digital age isn't speed or storage or bandwidth. It's trust. How do you verify identity, prevent impersonation, and establish confidence between strangers who will never meet? Humans have been working on this for thousands of years, and the internet broke most of what we'd figured out.
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Under the Hood · Trust
How Identity Works
You prove who you are dozens of times a day, passwords, fingerprints, face scans, little codes texted to your phone. But what does 'proving identity' actually mean? From passports to passkeys, the surprisingly deep question of how we know who's who.
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Under the Hood · Trust
How Encryption Works
Every time you send a message, buy something online, or check your bank balance, encryption is working in the background. But what is it actually doing? From Caesar's shifted alphabet to the elliptic curves protecting your bank account, the surprisingly beautiful mathematics of keeping secrets.
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Under the Hood · Trust
How Certificates Work
Every time your browser shows a padlock icon, a chain of trust is doing the work, from your bank's server, through intermediate authorities, up to a root certificate baked into your operating system. How that chain is built, why it sometimes breaks, and how Let's Encrypt changed everything.
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Under the Hood · Trust
How Reputation Systems Work
eBay stars, Amazon reviews, Uber ratings, PageRank, every platform that connects strangers needs a way to manufacture trust from thin air. How do they do it? And why do all of them eventually break?
Read articleHow Code Signing Works
Your Mac says an app is "from an identified developer". Windows asks if you trust the publisher. Your phone quietly verifies every update before installing it. All of it rests on code signing, the machinery that ties software to an identity and proves it hasn't been tampered with since. What that proof actually covers, why it says nothing about whether the software is safe, and how SolarWinds and the xz backdoor showed exactly where the guarantee runs out.
Coming soon