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

Summary

In this chapter, we saw how asymmetric encryption solved the problem of securely sharing a secret key in a data transaction. We compared two methods to achieve this, by using encryption or Diffie-Hellman, a key agreement protocol. We also saw how standards such as the PKCS assure vendor interoperability.

By now, you understand some of the requirements needed to create a strong algorithm, along with the importance of effectively managing both public and private keys. We saw the many uses for asymmetric encryption, which include key exchange, securing our email, generating a blockchain, and creating digital signatures.

We then compared a few asymmetric algorithms, such as RSA, PGP, and ECC. We also recognized that there are two main methods to provide trust when using a public key. The two ways to assure trust are the CA in a large environment such as the internet, or the Web of Trust in a smaller environment, such as an office. Finally, we saw how public-key encryption...