Technical Level: Introduction to Cryptography

Speaker: Robert Beggs
Cryptography, or “hidden writing”, allows the confidentiality and integrity of electronic data to be preserved when stored or transmitted across an insecure medium such as the Internet. This seminar will provide a hands-on approach to understanding and implementing cryptography. Topics covered will include steganography, private key and public key encryption, a brief overview of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), hashing algorithms and implementation, challenges to the existing hashing methodologies, and digital signatures. The evening will conclude with a review of attacks against cryptography to highlight the best means of deploying cryptography within an organization. For each topic, a live demo will be presented to aid in understanding the underlying technology as well as to provide a representative implementation example. All tools will be posted in advance of the seminar to allow attendees to download and test them prior to the meeting.

Presentation: PDF Here