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

Comparing passive and active attacks

An attack on an information system can be against any of the following services: confidentiality, integrity, availability, or authentication. To further define the types of attacks, there are two broad categories, passive and active:

  • Passive attacks do not interfere with the system or data integrity, and include activity such as scanning or eavesdropping using packet analysis.
  • Active attacks seek to disrupt services, modify, steal, or destroy data, and include attacks such as a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, or releasing malware.

In this section, we'll compare each of the categories and provide some examples of each, along with ways to protect against the various attacks.

Let's start with a discussion on passive attacks.

Carrying out a passive attack

With an active attack, there may be some network instability, system disruption, or data modification. However, with a passive attack, the objective is to do the...