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

Early uses of cryptography

For thousands of years, we have been trying to conceal private information in a variety of ways. Today, we use cryptographic techniques to protect credit card information, personally identifiable information (PII), and online transactions. However, over the years, much of the effort to protect information has stemmed from activity surrounding war efforts. Concealing information was done in an attempt to prevent the enemy from gaining access to sensitive information.

In this section, we'll take a look at some ancient ways to hide messages. We'll start with a few of the early examples used, which includes the scytale and even tattoos. We'll also review monoalphabetic ciphers, such as the Caesar cipher. We'll then review the introduction of polyalphabetic ciphers, using the Vigenère cipher as an example.

Let's start with a brief look at some ancient ways to conceal information.

Using tattoos and scytales

Early iterations...