Diego Bentivoglio : 22 September 2025 07:03
When we talk about cybersecurity, we immediately think of firewalls, malware, and zero-day exploits. But there’s a deeper level, unseen and unsurpassed: the laws of mathematics.
Because while software can be hacked, protocols can be bypassed, configurations can be messed up, mathematics cannot be corrupted.
And it is precisely on this pillar that modern cybersecurity is based.
Every digital defense technology works not because “someone programmed it well,” but because it exploits mathematical problems that have no efficient solution.
Here are some concrete examples: RSA: It is based on the difficulty of factoring numbers of hundreds of digits. With the current resources of the universe, it would take longer than the age of the cosmos to solve the problem. ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography): It exploits the complexity of discrete logarithms on elliptic curves, offering security equivalent to RSA but with much shorter keys.
Security does not come from a “secret hidden in the code,” but from a mathematical axiom: certain operations are easy in one direction, but prohibitive in another.
Let’s take the example of hashing. When we save a password, it’s never stored in plain text. It’s passed into a hash function (e.g., SHA-256, Argon2, or Bcrypt-10). These are fundamental features (mathematical, not “design”).
These properties are not conventions, they are results arising from mathematics that make it impossible to reverse the operation in a useful time.
Every security technology we use on a daily basis is pure mathematics disguised as software:
Cybersecurity isn’t just about tools, exploits, and pentests. It’s about number theory, algebra, discrete functions, logarithms, and probability.
The most feared hackers are not those who know how to launch an automated tool, but those who understand the numbers behind the code.
And that’s why we can say it without hesitation: Mathematics is one of the languages that ensures security in cyberspace. If we want to truly understand security, we must first understand mathematics.
Diego Bentivoglio