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

Influence of quantum computing

In the past decade, we started to see advancements in the field of quantum computing. Because of the sheer power of a quantum computer, some are concerned that our well-known cryptographic algorithms may not be able to withstand a brute-force attack using a quantum computer. In this section, we'll outline how quantum computing works, and see how the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is preparing to deal with this potential by selecting and standardizing post-quantum encryption algorithms.

Let's start by getting a better understanding of quantum computing.

Describing quantum computing

If we compare a classic and a quantum computer, there are distinct differences:

  • A classic computer uses binary digits (or bits) and is based on transistors that have two states, on or off.
  • A quantum computer uses quantum bits (or qubits), which can be in multiple states at the same time.

Quantum computing is based...