Tech Tuesday: Cryptography - 6:00pm, Tuesday, May 10, 2022

Click here to attend this presentation

For this month’s Tech Tuesday, our Director of Education, Charles Blas, will be hosting the second part of the three part series on cryptography. The first session was aimed at people who are just getting into the field. We covered the basic definitions (e.g. plaintext, ciphertext, encryption, hashing, etc...) and basic concepts like symmetric vs. asymmetric cryptography. We also played with a Diffie-Hellman simulator and emulated a secret key exchange.

In this section, we will cover the practical side of cryptography, walking through examples using, among other things, the Swiss Army knife of cryptography, OpenSSL. We will cover:

Encrypting and decrypting data using different algorithms, e.g. AES, 3DES, Blowfish, RC4, etc...
How passwords, keys, salts, and initialization vectors (IVs) come into play
How authenticated encryption works
The relative strengths of the algorithms
And how cryptography is used in Linux and Windows authentication
Encoding and decoding information, e.g. using base64
Hashing data and practical applications, e.g. for verifying authenticity of downloads or the integrity of an operating system
How SSH keys work
Digital signatures
Digital Certificates and PKI at a topical level
How to use GPG, including generating private keys and publishing public keys
How to share passwords securely, making the case for a password manager and comparing free and paid options

And if we have time, we'll also talk about NFTs!

In the June conclusion to this series we will go back to theory and cover cryptographic concepts from the CISSP exam (part of the Security Engineering domain) and go over some CISSP practice questions related to cryptography. We will deconstruct the AES algorithm, step by step, talk about the history of cryptography, etc...

This class will be 100% virtual over Zoom. Come as you are, there are no prerequisites and we will provide all the resources. We look forward to seeing you there!