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

Attacking the infrastructure

Most cryptosystems require a framework or infrastructure in order to effectively secure data. One infrastructure that enables all parties to communicate securely with one another is the PKI. PKI comprises the processes, elements, and algorithms that are required to securely send and receive data.

In addition to individual protocols, PKI can also suffer from attacks. In this section, we'll see how the PKI can provide the trust we need when making transactions on the internet. We'll then see how the PKI can be a target and can suffer from attacks such as an SSL/TLS strip, using stolen certificates to distribute malware, and denial-of-service attacks.

Let's start with a discussion on how the PKI guarantees trust.

Guaranteeing trust

When interacting with a company, it's important that you work with someone you can trust. If dealing with a traditional brick and mortar entity, you might look for a sign that shows an excellent...