Welcome to this review of the Pluralsight course CompTIA Security+ Cryptography by Chris Rees

Sixth course: Cryptography

This is Domain 6 of the exam and the last course in the learning path.

The first module, general cryptography concepts, starts off with the basics (e.g. difference between symmetric and asymmetric) and goes on to cover more advanced and newer concepts such as elliptic curve cryptography, quantum cryptography and perfect forward secrecy.

The second module, Using Appropriate Cryptographic Methods, covers a ton of different algorithms; RIPEMD, AES, Diffie-Hellman, RC4, One-time pads, NTLM, Blowfish, TwoFish, and many others.

Chris groups these together to make it more manageable, for example DES/3DES/AES are symmetric key algorithms and RSA/Diffie-Hellman are asymmetric key algorithms.

This module also includes a demo of using Kleopatra to setup Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG), encrypting and decrypting a text file.

The final module covers PKI infrastructure, certificate authorities and digital certificates.

Related courses:

Paul Lemmer’s Introduction to IIS certificates is much easier to understand having watched the PKI module of this Cryptography course first. If you want to dive deeper into Cryptography after watching this course, Michael Perry’s Cryptography Fundamentals for Java and .NET Developers is for you.

Recommended speed: 1.0x

Activities to complement this course:
Try out GPG. If you are a windows user try gpg4win