Chapter 7
Data security and integrity
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Contents:
▪ Fundamentals of secure networks; cryptography
▪ Encryption and privacy
▪ Authentication protocols
▪ Firewalls
▪ Virtual private Network
▪ Transport Layer Security
▪ Security policy
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WHAT IS SECURITY?
• Security is defined as “the quality or state of being secure - to be free from danger.”
• Is defined as the protection afforded to an automated information system in order to
attain the applicable objectives of preserving the integrity, availability and
confidentiality of information system resources (includes hardware, software, firmware,
information/data, and telecommunications)
• Security is often achieved by means of several strategies usually undertaken
simultaneously or used in combination with one another.
• Network security: which addresses the protection of an organization’s data, networking
devices, connections, and contents, and the ability to use that network to accomplish the
organization’s data communication functions
• Information security: includes the broad areas of information security management, computer
and data security, and network security.
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Security Goals
Prevention of unauthorized
disclosure of information
Confidentiality
Prevention of unauthorized
withholding of information or
Integrity resource
Prevention of unauthorized Availability
modification of information
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Confidentiality
• Only the sender and intended receiver should be able to understand the contents of the
transmitted message.
• Need for keeping information secret arises from use of computers in sensitive fields such as
government and industry
• Access mechanisms, such as cryptography, support confidentiality
Integrity
• Protection against unauthorized modification or destruction of information; often requires
preventing unauthorized changes Includes data integrity (content) and origin integrity (source of
data also called authentication)
• Information needs to be changed constantly. In a bank, when a customer deposits or withdraws
money, the balance of her account needs to be changed.
• Integrity means that changes need to be done only by authorized entities and through authorized
mechanisms.
• Integrity violation is not necessarily the result of a malicious act; an interruption in the system,
such as a power surge, may also create unwanted changes in some information.
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Availability
• The third component of information security is availability.
• The information created and stored by an organization needs to be available to authorized
entities.
• Information is useless if it is not available. Information needs to be constantly changed,
which means it must be accessible to authorized entities.
• The unavailability of information is just as harmful for an organization as the lack of
confidentiality or integrity.
• Imagine what would happen to a bank if the customers could not access their accounts for
transactions.
Attacks
• Our three goals of security confidentiality, integrity, and availability can be threatened by
security attacks.
• Although the literature uses different approaches to categorizing the attacks, we divide
them into three groups related to the security goals.
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Computer Security and Privacy/Attacks
Categories of Attacks/Threats (W. Stallings)
Source
Destination
Normal flow of information
Attack
Interruption Interception
Modification Fabrication
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categorizing the attacks based on the security goals
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Attacks Threatening Confidentiality
• In general, two types of attacks threaten the confidentiality of information: snooping
and traffic analysis.
Snooping
• Snooping refers to unauthorized access to or interception of data.
• To prevent snooping, the data can be made nonintelligible to the interceptor by using
encryption techniques.
Traffic Analysis
• Although encipherment of data may make it non-intelligible for the interceptor, she/he
can obtain some other type information by monitoring online traffic.
Attacks Threatening Integrity
• The integrity of data can be threatened by several kinds of attacks: modification,
masquerading, replaying, and repudiation.
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Modification
• After intercepting or accessing information, the attacker modifies the information to make
it beneficial to herself.
• Note that sometimes the attacker simply deletes or delays the message to harm the system
or to benefit from it.
Masquerading
• Masquerading, or spoofing, happens when the attacker impersonates somebody else.
• For example, an attacker might steal the bank card and PIN of a bank customer and
pretend that she is that customer.
• Sometimes the attacker pretends to be the receiver entity. For example, a user tries to
contact a bank, but another site pretends that it is the bank and obtains some information
from the user.
Replaying
• Replaying is another attack. The attacker obtains a copy of a message sent by a user and
later tries to replay it.
• For example, a person sends a request to her bank to ask for payment to the attacker, who
has done a job for her. The attacker intercepts the message and sends it again to receive
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another payment from the bank.
Repudiation
• This type of attack is different from others because it is performed by one of the two
parties in the communication: the sender or the receiver.
• The sender of the message might later deny that she/he has sent the message; the
receiver of the message might later deny that he has received the message.
• An example of denial by the sender would be a bank customer asking her bank to
send some money to a third party but later denying that she has made such a request.
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Attacks Threatening Availability
• We mention only one attack threatening availability: denial of service.
Denial of Service
• Denial of service (DoS) is a very common attack. It may slow down or totally interrupt the
service of a system.
• The attacker can use several strategies to achieve this. She might send so many bogus
requests to a server that the server crashes because of the heavy load.
• The attacker might intercept and delete a server’s response to a client, making the client
believe that the server is not responding.
• The attacker may also intercept requests from the clients, causing the clients to send
requests many times and overload the system. 12
Cryptography
• Cryptography, a word with Greek origins, means "secret writing."
• However, we use the term to refer to the science and art of transforming
messages to make them secure and immune to attacks.
Plaintext and Cipher text
• The original message, before being transformed, is called plaintext.
• After the message is transformed, it is called cipher text.
• An encryption algorithm transforms the plaintext into cipher text;
• A decryption algorithm transforms the cipher text back into plaintext.
• The sender uses an encryption algorithm, and the receiver uses a decryption
algorithm.
Cipher
• We refer to encryption and decryption algorithms as ciphers.
• The term cipher is also used to refer to different categories of algorithms in
cryptography. 13
Cryptography
Cryptography has five ingredients:
• Plaintext
• Encryption algorithm
• Secret Key
• Cipher text
• Decryption algorithm
Security depends on the secrecy of the key, not the secrecy of the
algorithm
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Cryptography
Simplified Encryption Model:
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Categories of cryptography
• We can divide all the cryptography algorithms (ciphers) into two groups:
• Symmetric key (also called secret-key) cryptography algorithms
• Asymmetric key (also called public-key) cryptography algorithms.
Symmetric-key cryptography
• In symmetric-key cryptography, the same key is used by both parties.
• The sender uses this key and an encryption algorithm to encrypt data; the receiver uses
the same key and the corresponding decryption algorithm to decrypt the data.
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▪ The key is shared
Asymmetric-key cryptography
• In asymmetric or public-key cryptography, there are two keys: a private key and a
public key.
• The private key is kept by the receiver. The public key is announced to the public.
• In Figure, imagine Alice wants to send a message to Bob. Alice uses the public key to
encrypt the message. When the message is received by Bob, the private key is used to
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decrypt the message
In public-key encryption/decryption,
• The public key that is used for encryption is different from the private key that is used
for decryption.
• The public key is available to the public;' the private key is available only to an
individual.
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Keys used in cryptography
▪ We are dealing with three types of keys in cryptography:
• The secret key, the public key, and the private key.
• The first, the secret key, is the shared key used in symmetric-key cryptography.
• The second and the third are the public and private keys used in asymmetric-key
cryptography
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Authentication
▪ Authentication is the process of validating the identity of someone or something.
▪ Authentication requires the presentation of credentials or items of value to really prove
the claim of who you are.
▪ The process of verifying the identity of a user or computer
✓ Questions: Who are you? How you prove it?
▪ Authentication provides a way of identifying users, typically by having them enter a
valid password before granting access .
▪ The process of identifying user based on username and password authentication controls
access by requiring valid user credentials.
▪ Authentication credentials include :
✓ A user name and password
✓Digital certificates
✓Token(visa cards) 20
There are Three types of Authentication method
1. Authenticating user by what he has
▪ This may be any form of issued or acquired self identification such as: SecurID,
Crypto Card, Active card, Safe Word, badges and many other forms of cards and tags.
2. Authenticating user by what he is (unique characteristics)
▪ This being a naturally acquired physical characteristic such as voice, fingerprint, iris
pattern and other biometrics.
3. Authenticating user based on what a user knows
▪ This may be something you mentally possess. This could be a password, user ID, PINs
a secret word known by the user and the authenticator.
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Firewall
• A network device hardware, software, or a combination that determines what traffic
should be allowed or denied to pass in or out of network.
• It comes either software host based or network hardware based.
• A firewall is a device that filters all traffic between inside a network and outside network.
• Is a tool that provides a filter of both incoming and outgoing packets.
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Firewall Functions
1. Protect the system from the hackers from logging into machines on network.
2. Provide a single access point from where security and audit can be imposed.
3. Act as an effective tracing tool.
4. Provide an important logging and auditing function
5. Provide information about the nature of traffic and the number of attempts
made to break into it.
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A firewall as it stops certain internal and external transactions
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Types of Firewall
➢ Most firewall perform two security functions
➢ Packet filtering based on accept or deny policy that is itself based on rules of
security policy.
➢ This policies vary ranging from completely disallowing some traffic to
allowing some of the traffic .
➢ Application proxy gateways that provide services to the inside users and at the same
time protect each individual host from the “bad” outside users.
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Types of Firewall
➢ A packet filter firewall is essentially a router that has been programmed to filter out or
allow to pass certain IP addresses or TCP port numbers.
➢ A proxy server is a more advanced firewall that acts as a doorman into a corporate
network.
➢ Any external transaction that request something from the corporate network must
enter through the proxy server, this server replaces the IP addresses of the packets
going out by its own address.
➢ Proxy servers are more advanced but make external accesses slower.
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Virtual Private Network
• A virtual private network (VPN) is a network that uses a public telecommunication
infrastructure, such as the Internet, to provide remote offices or individual users with
secure access to their organization's network.
• A virtual private network can be contrasted with an expensive system of owned or leased
lines that can only be used by one organization.
• The goal of a VPN is to provide the organization with the same capabilities, but at a much
lower cost.
• A VPN works by using the shared public infrastructure while maintaining privacy
through security procedures and tunneling protocols such as the Layer Two Tunneling
Protocol (L2TP).
• In effect, the protocols, by encrypting data at the sending end and decrypting it at the
receiving end, send the data through a "tunnel" that cannot be "entered" by data that is not
properly encrypted.
• An additional level of security involves encrypting not only the data, but also the
originating and receiving network addresses.
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VPN
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Transport Layer Security(TLS)
• The primary goal of the TLS protocol is to provide privacy and data integrity between
two communicating applications.
• The protocol is composed of two layers:
• The TLS Record Protocol and
• The TLS Handshake Protocol.
• At the lowest level, layered on top of some reliable transport protocol (e.g., TCP [TCP]),
is the TLS Record Protocol.
• The TLS Record Protocol provides connection security
• The connection is private. Symmetric cryptography is used for data encryption.
• The keys for this symmetric encryption are generated uniquely for each connection
and are based on a secret negotiated by another protocol (such as the TLS Handshake
Protocol).
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• The TLS Handshake Protocol provides connection security that has three basic
properties:
• The peer's identity can be authenticated using asymmetric, or public key,
cryptography. This authentication can be made optional, but is generally required
for at least one of the peers.
• The negotiation of a shared secret is secure: the negotiated secret is unavailable to
eavesdroppers, and for any authenticated connection the secret cannot be obtained,
even by an attacker who can place himself in the middle of the connection.
• The negotiation is reliable: no attacker can modify the negotiation communication
without being detected by the parties to the communication.
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Security policy
• A security policy is a formal statement of rules by which people who
are given access to an organization's technology and information
assets must abide. or
• A security policy is essentially a document summarizing how the
corporation will use and protect its computer and network resources.
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Security Policy Design Issues
▪ What is the company’s desired level of security?
▪ How much money is the company willing to invest in security?
▪ If the company is serious about restricting access through an Internet link, what
about restricting access through all other entry ways?
▪ The company must have a well-designed security policy.
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10 Tips for Computer Network Security
1. Use a good anti-virus program.
2. Make sure your virus definitions are up-to-date.
3. Run regular virus scans.
4. Update your operating system regularly.
5. Configure and use a firewall.
6. Use your Web browser’s security features.
7. Enable your router’s security features.
8. Install an anti-spyware program.
9. Use strong, varied passwords.
10. Consider a computer network security suite and policy. . 33
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