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

Examining a certificate

The foundation of a PKI is the contents of an X.509 certificate. X.509 is the format a CA uses to provide assurance that a public key belongs to an entity contained within a certificate.

In this section, we'll take a high-level look at a certificate and then see what's involved in the X.509 standard. Then, we'll see the different ways a certificate can be validated and compare the many ways one can be used today.

Let's start with taking a high-level look at a certificate.

Viewing a certificate

When you are on a secure site, you will see a lock. When selected, the dialog box will drop down and assure you that the site is secure, as shown here using Mozilla:

Figure 8.15 – Google secure connection

Figure 8.15 – Google secure connection

While in the Mozilla browser, if you select the arrow to the right of the Connection secure notification, you can expand the information. You can then select more information (found at the bottom of...