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

Recognizing cryptographic attacks

We rely on cryptographic techniques and algorithms to secure our systems. However, we must be aware of the possibility of an attack on encryption protocols and techniques that can result in our data being compromised.

Over the years, there have been many documented attacks, some simple, some more complex. For example, early algorithms, such as mono-alphabetic ciphers, can easily be attacked using letter frequency analysis. However, as ciphers became more complex, the types of attacks also had to become more sophisticated.

In this section, we'll discuss brute-force, password, and Man-in-The-Middle (MiTM) attacks, along with a brief look at some less-known methods used to compromise a system. In addition, we'll discuss Kali Linux, a powerful suite of tools that can be used to attack cryptographic techniques. We'll also see how WEP, an early wireless encryption protocol, was a weak cipher that allowed a malicious actor to obtain...