Encryption and Cryptography for Professionals

Explore the fundamentals of symmetric key cryptography, comparing block ciphers and stream ciphers, their modes of operation, padding considerations, and security risks like bit flipping attacks.

Explore the inner workings and security of common symmetric encryption, focusing on AES block cipher and RC4 stream cipher, including S-box, rounds, key sizes, and differential cryptanalysis.

Learn how symmetric encryption enables secure bulk data transfer over the internet. See why it requires asymmetric cryptography for key exchange and how SSL/TLS and hash functions protect data integrity.

Secure data at rest with symmetric encryption and full disk encryption, protecting devices from loss or theft. Understand risks from weak passwords, cold boot attacks, memory dumps, and side channels.

Explore the fundamentals of public key cryptography, including public and private keys, encryption, digital signatures, and the benefits of confidentiality, authentication, and non repudiation.

Explore how hard problems like factoring and the discrete logarithm drive usable yet secure public key cryptography, and assess Shor's impact and post-quantum encryption algorithms.

Explore two common asymmetric encryption algorithms: RSA and Diffie-Hellman, with RSA relying on the factoring problem and Diffie-Hellman on the discrete logarithm problem, illustrating public key cryptography and key exchange.

Explore public key infrastructure, certificate chains, and the trust model that underpins secure web sites, code signing, and email signatures, while examining PKI assumptions and potential weaknesses.

explains how asymmetric cryptography enables key sharing to establish a shared secret for secure data transfer, covering diffie-hellman, elliptic-curve diffie-hellman, ephemeral key exchange, and ssl handshakes.

Evaluate hash functions as one-way, deterministic cryptographic algorithms designed for data integrity, not confidentiality, and apply them in Merkle trees to verify and summarize data blocks.

Explore the security requirements of hash functions, including one way function, large state space, and non locality, and how the pigeonhole principle and birthday paradox constrain collision resistance.

Trace the history of hash algorithms and learn how collision resistance and one-way functions define their security, including MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, and the SHA family.

Explore how hash functions underpin secure credential storage for passwords, from plain text to salted hashes and key derivation, highlighting rainbow tables, collision resistance, and common security failures.

Explore how hash functions protect data integrity across digital signatures, malware detection, tls, and blockchain, by leveraging one-way properties and collision resistance to detect tampering.

Explore secure multi party computation and Shamir's secret sharing, where mutually distrusting parties compute a shared result without revealing inputs. Learn applications in elections, corporate partnerships, and private data processing.

Explore zero knowledge proofs, showing how you can verify knowledge of a secret without revealing it, using a colored-ball example and iterative verification, with applications in authentication and blockchain.

Explore ring signatures that prove a message was signed by a member of a public-key group without revealing which member, enabling disclosures in organizations, using elliptic curve cryptography and decoys.

Examine why post-quantum cryptography is needed as Shor's algorithm threatens public-key schemes, and survey lattice-based, multivariate, hash-based, code-based, and supersingular elliptic-curve approaches and applications in ssl and block chain.

Explain the need for homomorphic encryption, how it enables computations on ciphertext, and distinguish fully versus partially homomorphic systems for processing data in use on untrusted platforms.