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

Maintaining integrity

It's essential to keep data in its original, unaltered form. Although there may be threats to the organization, encryption can ensure data integrity and prevent data from being changed, destroyed, or lost in an unauthorized or accidental manner. Organizations seek to protect the data and system resources, by implementing security strategies.

In this section, we'll take a look at just what's at stake, by first outlining the meaning of assets. We'll then clarify the definition of risk, which is a product of threats and vulnerabilities. You'll then understand how decreasing vulnerabilities will reduce overall risk.

Let's start with defining assets.

Protecting assets

When implementing security strategies, an organization seeks to protect their assets from threats such as cyberattacks or theft. Assets are either tangible or intangible goods that can be assigned a value:

Figure 3.10 – Tangible and intangible assets

Figure 3.10 – Tangible...