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

Summary

In this chapter, we saw how a PKI provides trust while communicating on a network and allows us to securely exchange keys during a data transaction. We saw that a PKI is not a single protocol but a framework comprised of several different components, which include the algorithms, keys, and CAs. In addition, we covered where we store certificates on our own systems and learned what happens when a certificate is no longer valid.

We then took a look at the process of obtaining a digital certificate from a CA. We also discussed ways a malicious actor can intercept and spoof a certificate, and then outlined how pinning a certificate can help prevent spoofing. Finally, we defined trusted root and self-signed certificates and saw the steps to take to create a code-signing certificate on a Windows machine. We then covered what's involved in the X.509 standard, which defines the format of public key certificates. Finally, we saw the different ways a certificate can be validated...