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

Chapter 5: Dissecting Asymmetric Encryption

Symmetric algorithms offer fast, efficient encryption while ensuring data confidentiality. However, both parties must share the same secret key. In this chapter, we'll discuss the other main form of encryption: asymmetric (or public-key) encryption. We'll learn how asymmetric encryption was developed to solve the problem of securely exchanging the shared secret key, but then evolved to provide other benefits. You'll understand the two ways to obtain a shared secret key, by using encryption or using a key agreement protocol, such as Diffie-Hellman. We'll also outline how using Diffie-Hellman helps provide perfect forward secrecy.

We'll then cover other uses for public-key encryption, such as securing email and creating a digital signature. We'll discover how using standards, such as the Public Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS), helps provide interoperability among vendors. To understand what is necessary...