Riley Dickens

Is Your PKI Healthy?

Encryption is used every day to secure online communications between two individuals or between clients and servers. Though you may not see it in action, encryption obscures your data-at-rest and data-in-transit from outside attackers who are potentially monitoring your communications. Encryption works by taking in plaintext data, or data that is unobscured, and turning that plaintext into ciphertext.

What are Encryption Protocols and How Do They Work?

The process of SSL stripping is a fairly straightforward Man in the Middle attack. An SSL strip, as the name implies, strips a connection from an HTTPS connection to a lesser HTTP connection. The attacker does this by setting themselves up in the middle of the connection between the client and the server.

A Detailed Guide to Preventing SSL Stripping

Code Signing plays an important role as it can identify legitimate software compared to malware or rogue code. In technical terms, Code Signing creates a hash of the code and encrypts it with a private key adding its signature. During execution this signature is validated and if the hash matches, it gives assurance that the code has not been modified. It also establishes assurance that the code is issued from the legitimate author that it is claiming to be.

A Detailed Guide to Code Signing Abuse

A PKI is a setup that provides digital certificates to end-users, systems, devices, and applications to provide them with trusted identities. These identities are used for authentication of the certificate holder, as well as for establishing secure communications to other certificate holders within the network. A PKI infrastructure is based upon asymmetric key cryptography utilizing a public key and private key pair associated with a digital certificate issued by an Issuing Certificate Authority (CA).

A Detailed Guide on Building your own PKI

Root Certificate- Root vs Intermediate certificate

Root Certificates – Root vs Intermediate Certificates

cloud data lake security

Cloud Data Lake Security

KMS, IAM, and DLP can also be integrated with Google Cloud Functions to encrypt data when uploaded to Google Cloud Storage automatically. Google Cloud Dataflow can use DLP and KMS to encrypt data automatically from several different storage locations. This shows how users can create their own, potentially more robust data encryption methods to assist in the storage of sensitive data on the Cloud.

Google Cloud Platform’s Data Encryption Tools – KMS, HSMs, and PKIs

Key Management Recommendations and Best Practices

Key Management – Recommendations and Best Practices

Data Loss Prevention in Cloud Computing

Format Preserving Encryption (FPE) – Usage on GCP