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

Outlining symmetric algorithms

When designing a cryptographic algorithm, the idea is to have an elegant and efficient cipher that secures data with an appropriate amount of confusion and diffusion. In this segment, we'll review the elements that make symmetric encryption computationally fast and capable of efficiently performing the calculations necessary to encrypt data. We'll then review AES, DES, and other algorithms used in a production network. We'll finish with a discussion on how the keys to be used in each round or iteration during encryption are generated.

Let's start by discussing the key concepts in symmetric encryption.

Understanding symmetric encryption

The term symmetric means balanced or equal, which is a fitting description for symmetric encryption as it uses the same shared secret key to encrypt and decrypt text.

Symmetric encryption, also called conventional or secret key encryption, is done in a straightforward manner, using the...