Summary

In this chapter, you learned about several types of encryption and how they differ; you also read a high-level overview of how they work. You learned how, on a high-level, some of these encryption technologies are combined to form more-involved forms of encryption intended to solve multiple problems at one time, as with message enveloping and the Secure Socket Layer protocol. This description is as detailed as this book will get on any of these encryption algorithms. This book is not intended to teach you how to develop new encryption algorithms but instead how to use those that already exist and are available for your use as part of the Windows operating system. You need to understand, on a high-level, how these different types of encryption work, but you don't need to know the nitty-gritty details.

Also in this chapter, you looked briefly at the too-often-overlooked topic of security and audit logs. You learned why it is important to write and maintain these logs, along with what types of information you should be sure to record in them. You also learned under what circumstances you should record events in these logs.

In the next several chapters, you'll learn about the cryptographic extensions to the Windows API that Microsoft has been building into the operating system over the past few years. You'll see how you can use these API calls to build various cryptographic functions into your applica tions, all without knowing the nitty-gritty details of how the encryption is done. After the section on adding encryption capabilities into your applications, you'll find a series of chapters on interacting with the security infrastructure built into the Windows NT operating system, including some new security features in the Windows 2000 operating system. Finally, you'll find a few chapters on various related nonprogramming issues, such as an overview of Microsoft's Certificate Server application and an overview of the legal landscape surrounding encryption and security programming.

Anyway, you most likely didn't buy this book just to read about security and encryption on a high-level. You probably bought this book to learn how to program security and encryption into your applications, with actual code that you can get your hands around and play with. If this is the case, then let's get started with the next chapter. Get ready to start hacking some code!