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

Securing wireless communications

Wireless communication is pervasive in today's society. Also known as the 802.11 standard (Wi-Fi), this form of communication is a radio wave that can be easily attacked. Some best-practice suggestions to protect Wi-Fi traffic include the following:

  • Restrict access by securing your router.
  • Use antimalware protection.
  • Change the default password on your device.
  • Use encryption to protect the data.

In this section, we'll briefly outline why we need to encrypt our wireless traffic, and take a look at some common protocols for Wi-Fi.

Let's start with a discussion on why we need to secure our wireless communications.

Preventing eavesdropping

When sending and receiving wireless transactions on a LAN, there may be sensitive information transmitted. For example, if you are in a coffee shop that offers free internet, the connection might not be encrypted.

Using an unencrypted connection will leave your...