The Basics with a Side of Crypto: Shifting and Masking in PHP

We rarely need the basic skills of shifting, masking, or two’s complement arithmetic. Yet these remain important fundamentals. We’ll use a problem of applied cryptography (cache-timing attacks) to walk through the skills of one’s complement and two’s complement arithmetic, bit masks, shifting, and bitwise operations. We’re hitting the fundamentals of binary manipulation with zero prior knowledge expected. If you were never taught binary arithmetic, this talk is for you. After this talk, we’ll be far more comfortable with bitwise operators and what happens “under the covers.”

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