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 public-key algorithms

We understand what is required to create a strong algorithm and see the value in using a key pair. In this section, we'll take a look at a few public-key algorithms, such as RSA and ECC. We'll also see how PGP and GPG can secure our email with little or no effort. Finally, we'll discuss methods we use to ensure trust when using a public key.

Let's start with outlining how RSA is used to secure data.

Outlining RSA

In 1977, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman developed RSA, a widely recognized cipher that is used in a number of different applications.

RSA uses a variety of encryption key lengths that include the following: 1,024-bit, 2,048-bit, and 4,096-bit lengths. The algorithm is used when sending a shared secret key in symmetric encryption. However, it can also be used to encrypt documents and create a digital signature.

Let's step through what is involved when calculating private and public keys using...