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

Understanding cryptographic requirements

When using asymmetric encryption, we need an algorithm that can generate a mathematically related key pair. In this section, we'll take a look at some of the cryptographic requirements of using an asymmetric algorithm, and we'll see an example of generating a key pair. We'll then discuss the importance of managing the public and private key, and finish with ways we can use asymmetric encryption.

Let's start with some requirements when generating a key pair.

Designing a strong algorithm

When something is strong it is resistant to being broken, such as an impenetrable fortress. An encryption algorithm is no exception, in that we want one that is able to withstand a brute-force attack and continue to provide data confidentiality and integrity. Some of the considerations when designing a strong asymmetric algorithm include the following:

  • It must be effortless to generate a mathematically related public and private...