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 symmetric encryption operation modes

When encrypting data using symmetric encryption, an operating mode defines the way the plaintext, key, and algorithm are configured to encrypt the text. Block ciphers can encrypt a variety of block sizes, such as 64-bit, 128-bit, or 256-bit, in the following modes of operation:

  • Electronic Codebook (ECB)
  • Cipher Block Chaining (CBC)
  • Cipher Feedback (CFB)
  • Output Feedback (OFB)
  • Counter Mode (CTR)

In this section, we'll take a look at the different modes of operation used to encrypt data. We'll start with the simplest, ECB, and then move on to CBC, CFB, and OFB, which add feedback to strengthen the encryption process. We'll then finish with a look at CTR, which provides security using parallelism, to provide a more efficient way to encrypt data.

Let's start with ECB.

Using ECB

ECB is a simple block-cipher operating mode that encrypts each block of text independently, and is illustrated...