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

Describing a hash algorithm

In order to securely exchange data, we use more than just encryption algorithms, we also use cryptographic tools, techniques, and protocols.

Symmetric and asymmetric encryption ensures confidentiality by scrambling data into an unreadable form. The message won't mean anything to anyone unless they have the key. With the key, we can decrypt the data so that it makes sense.

Along with encryption, another important cryptographic technique is hashing. In this section, we'll outline what it means to create a hash of a message, and see what characteristics make a hash of a message different from encrypting a message. We'll also review the many uses for a hash algorithm.

Let's start with learning how a hash is created.

Creating a hash

Encryption uses a key or pair of keys. When we encrypt a message, we can decrypt the message as long as we have the key. A hash is different in that it is one-way. You cannot generate the original...