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

Discovering the evolution of symmetric encryption

Today, encryption plays a key role in securing digital data during transactions. This includes everything from online shopping to phone calls, and even messages coming from our watches and other devices that constantly send and receive data. Encryption also protects data at rest, such as data stored in the cloud or on a drive.

Prior to the 1970s, there wasn't much thought about securing digital data. Any data processing was secure in early Local Area Networks (LANs), and the internet was just starting to take shape. However, large organizations began to evaluate the need to secure our data. One such company was IBM, an industry leader in technology. IBM put together a group of scientists to design a solution to protect customer data.

In this section, we'll take a look at some of the motivators behind creating an encryption algorithm to secure data. We'll also discuss the Feistel cipher, which is significant as...