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Example research essay topic: Public And Private Plug Ins - 1,827 words

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... ture certifying the two other core pieces of information in this certificate Plug-ins are available for a number of commercial e-mail and USENET news applications, including Outlook, Outlook Express and Eudora. The plug-ins can verify the authenticity of documents signed using digital certificates issued by Thawte or Verisign. They also have the ability to encrypt and decrypt documents for secured delivery to remote recipients over an otherwise insecure network. The common mechanism by which applications send signed or encrypted documents using digital certificates is S/MIME (Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). S/MIME is very similar in operation to PGP in that it also offers the ability to sign and / or encrypt messages.

However, S/MIME is more flexible than its PGP counterpart in that it is not limited to just X 509 certificate authentication and it is not restricted to just encrypting / authenticating message data. For example, S/MIME has the ability to include multiple sub-documents within an e-mail, where each sub-document can be signed by different parties. In fact, one sub-document might even be a PGP signed message itself! The primary use for SSL is secure access to Internet Web servers. SSL operates via public key encryption. In addition to exchange of keys, SSL allows negotiation of a cipher algorithm for the session.

Algorithms include 3 DES (triple encryption DES), IDEA (as also used by PGP), and RC 2 or RC 4 (which in their US export versions can only be used with 40 -bit encryption as opposed to 128 -bit). It is worth noting that 40 -bit encryption has been known to be vulnerable for some time (witness a C-Net News article in 1997). Whitfield Diffie's paper on "Minimal Key Lengths for Symmetric Ciphers to Provide Adequate Commercial Security" (1996) suggests that "bearing in mind that the additional computational costs of stronger encryption are modest, we strongly recommend a minimum key-length of 90 bits for symmetric crypto systems. " The SSL protocol is likely to be superceded in use by the forthcoming Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. A firewall system is in essence a network router that also performs filtering on the traffic which passes through it.

The level of deployment of firewalls within the HE community is not known by the authors, but it is suspected that many institutions have no system in use, either on their point of presence to JANET or internally within the institution. It is important to recognise that while the introduction of firewall technology has to be seen as a Good Thing, the mere addition of a firewall system to a network's entry point to the Internet does not guarantee complete security. In academic circles, it may be that, due to the pressures imposed by supporters of "academic freedom", such firewalls run in "default allow" mode rather than "default deny", thus only blocking a subset of known potential attack avenues for intruders. And even if "default deny" mode is used, there is the potential for intruders to gain access through allowed services (such as POP or IMAP mail servers, web servers, or SMTP e-mail hubs) if these are not tightly configured. JTAP Project 631 is piloting the "smooth" introduction of a "default deny" firewall at Southampton. The same project is investigating methods for allowing secure remote access through firewalls.

Whether or not a firewall is deployed, secure protocols are still required both to protect the integrity and privacy of data, and also for authentication of users in a transaction. A number of firewall products have built-in support for authentication or encryption systems (e. g. Firewall- 1 has support for securID). The SSH suite of utilities offers secure replacements for the standard Unix utilities rlogin, rsh and rcp. It provides a secure encrypted communication channel between two machines over an insecure network.

The channel is used for the interactive login session, but other traffic can be piggy-backed on the channel, such as the X protocol, thus benefiting from the security provided. The channel can also be compressed, which is a major benefit over slow links such as modems and international connections. Authentication can be done by conventional techniques (such a plain text password or the Unix. ross mechanism) or by using RSA public-key cryptography. The latter uses public and private keys associated with a user, and a pass phrase is used to authenticate the user (the pass phrase is typed in locally, and not sent across the network). Machines also have public and private keys and these can be used to stop security breaches via machine spoofing (IP spoofing, DNS spoofing or routing spoofing).

SSH clients are available for both Unix and Microsoft operating systems. 2. 8 Securing Workstation File Storage Whatever secure protocols are used to transfer a document across a network, there will often be a copy of the document held somewhere on the user's workstation. It is very easy for the workstation user to accidentally give away access to confidential documents to other people and other computers. To cite two examples, it could be done on a Microsoft Windows system by having an insecure administrator password and "sharing" entire hard disks; it could be done on a Unix system by using insecure passwords or by lack of user knowledge about file access controls. These concerns also apply to backups, which can be encrypted or password protected. There are products on the market that help to solve these problems: these work by encrypting data at either the file level or file-system level. Microsoft Windows NT 2000 proclaims to have the ability to encrypt at the file-system level: as long as users logout from their workstations, their files should be unreadable by others.

Data Fellows market a product "F-Secure File Crypto" which claims to provide similar facilities by integrating encryption services tightly with the file-system and user-interface. In addition to facilities for encrypting and decrypting individual files, PGP for Microsoft Windows and for the Macintosh also contain a product called "PGPDisk." This creates a new file system (represented as a new drive letter) containing files that are always stored encrypted. This provides users with a very simple means of keeping a collection of files secure. 2. 9 Secure Internet Protocol (IPsec) Rather than putting extra load on client applications to diligently authenticate and validate the integrity of data they receive, a more appropriate technique may be to place all of the security and data integrity related functionality down into the network, or Internet Protocol (IP), layer. The inherent problem at the moment is that the existing Internet Protocol (IPv 4) was never designed with security in mind; IP is principally there to route datagrams over a network on a best effort basis, with the transport layer (TCP) ensuring reliable, but not secure, delivery. An emerging protocol that attempts to correct this weakness and thus offer truly transparent IP delivery (in that higher-layers need not worry about data integrity) is Secure-IP, or IPsec. The purpose of IPsec is to provide a standard mechanism for protecting all traffic on a network transparently, irrespective of the application.

It can protect all traffic against unauthorized modification and eavesdropping and securely authenticate the parties that are communicating with each other. It renders most of the commonly used security attack methods ineffective. IPsec is a means by which secure VPNs can be offered over public network backbones. However, IPsec is very much a retrospective "bolt-on" to the existing IP.

This will change in the near future because IPv 6, the next generation IP, has IPsec in its core specification. That is to say that all IPv 6 capable devices must fully support the IPsec suite of protocols for authentication and encryption. At the present time, it is not clear how readily IPsec as is could be deployed over JANET. It may be that JANET will have to wait until IPv 6 comes to fruition. Whilst the core protocol specifications are well along the standards track, it is unlikely that IPv 6 will be deployed commercially for several years yet. Production IPv 6 networks exist (notably the 6 REN and WIDE projects) and production IPv 6 stacks exist for the more popular operating systems and network hardware.

However, there is currently little activity in the UK as most people are waiting for deployment success stories to be published before taking the risk of migrating to IPv 6. At the time of writing, only the University of Southampton (the authors of this report) and Lancaster University are early adopters of IPv 6 within JANET, and only Southampton have native IPv 6 WAN links in use (to UUNET UK). The establishment of the European-led IPv 6 Forum, which within a month of its launch already has 50 companies signed up to it, is a positive sign for future IPv 6 growth. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the main body promoting new Internet standards (RFCs, or Requests for Comments). They have a number of Working Groups that drive forward activities in various areas.

To appreciate the current hot topics in security, a good place to look is the list of IETF Security-related Working Groups: An Open Specification for Pretty Good Privacy (openpgp) Authenticated Firewall Traversal (aft) Common Authentication Technology (cat) Domain Name System Security (dnssec) Intrusion Detection Exchange Format (id) One Time Password Authentication (otp) Public-Key Infrastructure (X. 509) (pkix) Simple Public Key Infrastructure (ski) Which Groups are of relevance to this overview? In short, all of them, but there are two worth mentioning in particular. One is the Public-Key Infrastructure (X. 509) Working Group (one chair of which is from Verisign). They promote X. 509 v 3: "Many Internet protocols and applications which use the Internet employ public-key technology for security purposes and require a public-key infrastructure (PKI) to securely manage public keys for widely-distributed users or systems. The X. 509 standard constitutes a widely-accepted basis for such an infrastructure, defining data formats and procedures related to distribution of public keys via certificates digitally signed by certification authorities (CAs). " The other is the Transport Layer Security (TLS) Group. TLS was designed to supersede SSL 3. 0, and Version 1. 0 made full RFC status in 1999.

According to this RFC, the goals of the TLS Protocol include cryptographic security, interoperability ("independent programmers should be able to develop applications utilizing TLS that will then be able to successfully exchange cryptographic parameters without knowledge of one another's code") and extensibility ("TLS seeks to provide a framework into which new public key and bulk encryption methods can be incorporated as necessary"). TLS is currently public key oriented, and thus a set of Kerberos Cipher Suites is also being planned. The IETF will continue to deliver solutions for security problems on the Internet through RFCs. It is very important to track their activities, and in-house solutions that ignore the IETF Draft and final RFCs risk becoming isolated. The development of the TLS is a good sign for interoperability, with at least one open source implementation (OpenSSL) already available. Bibliography:


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Research essay sample on Public And Private Plug Ins

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