Book Image

Modern Cryptography for Cybersecurity Professionals

By : Lisa Bock
Book Image

Modern Cryptography for Cybersecurity Professionals

By: Lisa Bock

Overview of this book

In today's world, it is important to have confidence in your data storage and transmission strategy. Cryptography can provide you with this confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation. But are you aware of just what exactly is involved in using cryptographic techniques? Modern Cryptography for Cybersecurity Professionals helps you to gain a better understanding of the cryptographic elements necessary to secure your data. The book begins by helping you to understand why we need to secure data and how encryption can provide protection, whether it be in motion or at rest. You'll then delve into symmetric and asymmetric encryption and discover how a hash is used. As you advance, you'll see how the public key infrastructure (PKI) and certificates build trust between parties, so that we can confidently encrypt and exchange data. Finally, you'll explore the practical applications of cryptographic techniques, including passwords, email, and blockchain technology, along with securely transmitting data using a virtual private network (VPN). By the end of this cryptography book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of cryptographic techniques and terms, learned how symmetric and asymmetric encryption and hashed are used, and recognized the importance of key management and the PKI.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Securing Our Data
5
Section 2: Understanding Cryptographic Techniques
9
Section 3: Applying Cryptography in Today's World

Describing a PKI framework

If you see a lock by the web address when making a transaction on the internet, as shown in the following screenshot, you can be confident the site is secure:

Figure 8.1 – The Packt Publishing website showing a lock to indicate a secure site

Figure 8.1 – The Packt Publishing website showing a lock to indicate a secure site

The lock represents trust, which means that when exchanging data with the website, your data is secure. A PKI verifies the identities of both parties so that they can encrypt and securely exchange information.

This trust is possible because of a PKI—a framework used to generate, manage, and distribute digital certificates.

A PKI framework helps to ensure data confidentiality and integrity and is essential for several applications, such as securing email and encrypting data transactions.

In this section, we'll see how a PKI ensures trust and allows us to securely exchange keys during a data transaction, along with some of the different components of a PKI. In...