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

Summary

In this chapter, we examined the differences between active and passive attacks. We saw how a passive attack is done to either learn information about devices on the network, or pick up confidential information, such as usernames and passwords. We then learned the different types of active attacks, which can modify the integrity of our systems and lead to data loss or compromise.

So that you can understand why encryption is so important, we outlined just what is at risk. We learned the different types of attack vectors, and the different defense mechanisms such as logical and physical security, security appliances, along with policies. Finally, we learned how organizations seek to protect assets and maintain system integrity, and how using countermeasures can reduce vulnerabilities and reduce overall risk.

In the next chapter, we'll discover symmetric encryption. We'll start with briefly covering some of the early ciphers, Lucifer and Feistel, and their influence...