CHAPTER FIVE

COMPUTER AND NETWORK

SECURITY

Instructor: Fanta T (MSC)

1
 Outline
• What is Security?
• Security trend
• Sources and consequences of risks
• Types of Vulnerabilities
• Security criteria
• Security attack types
• Security services and mechanisms
• Cryptography

2
 Computer and Network Security
• What is Security?
 Security is about
• Threats (bad things that may happen, e.g. your money getting
stolen)
• Vulnerabilities (weaknesses in your defenses, e.g. your front
door being made of thin wood and glass)
• Attacks (ways in which the threats may be actualized,
• e.g. a thief breaking through your weak front door while you
and the neighbors are on holiday)

3
 Computer and Network Security…

“The most secure

computers are those
not connected
to the Internet and
shielded
from any interference”

4
 Computer and Network Security…
• Computer security is about provisions
and policies adopted to protect
information and property from theft,
corruption, or natural disaster
– while allowing the information and
property to remain accessible and
productive to its intended users.
• security of computers against intruders
(e.g.,hackers) and malicious software
(e.g., viruses).

5
 Computer and Network Security…
• Network security on the other hand deals with provisions
and policies adopted to prevent and monitor unauthorized
access, misuse, modification, or denial of the computer
network and network-accessible resources.

Not Sufficient!!

Internet
Internet 6
 Security trends
• In 1994, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) issued a report
entitled "Security in the Internet Architecture" (RFC 1636).
• The report stated the general consensus that the Internet needs
more and better security, and it identified key areas for security
mechanisms.
• Among these were:
– the need to secure the network infrastructure from unauthorized
monitoring and control of network traffic and
– the need to secure end-user-to-end-user traffic using
authentication and encryption mechanisms.

7
 Who are the attackers?
• Vandals (Hackers, crackers) driven by intellectual challenge.
• Insiders: employees or customers seeking revenge or gain informal
benefits
• Natural disasters: flooding, fire, storms, earthquake…
• Criminals seeking financial gain.
• Organized crime seeking gain or hiding criminal activities.
• Organized terrorist groups or nation states trying to influence national
policy.
• Foreign agents seeking information (spying) for economic, political, or
military purposes.
• Tactical countermeasures intended to disrupt military capability.
• Large organized terrorist groups
• Cyber attacks

8
 What are the vulnerabilities?
•Physical vulnerabilities (Eg. Computer can be stolen)
•Natural vulnerabilities (Eg. Earthquake)
•Hardware and Software vulnerabilities (Eg. Failures)
•Media vulnerabilities (Eg. Hard disks can be stolen)
•Communication vulnerabilities (Ex. Wires can be tapped)
•Human vulnerabilities (Eg. Insiders)
•Poorly chosen passwords
•Software bugs (non reliability of software)
– buffer overflow attacks

9
 Consequences…
• Failure/End of service
• Reduction of QoS, down to Denial of Service (DDoS)
• Internal problems in the enterprise
• Trust decrease from partners (client, providers, share-
holders)
• Technology leakage
• Human consequences (personal data, sensitive data -
medical, insurances, …)

10
 Security and privacy criteria
 Properties of Security?
• Security is expressed in terms of:
 Confidentiality (Privacy)
 Integrity
 No repudiation
 Availability (Denial of Service)

• Authentication is a foundations of security

 In its absence, security properties can be violated

11
 Security criteria (in detail)
• To understand the types of threats to security that exist, first we
need to have a definition of security requirements.
• In this section, different security requirements are presented.

Availability
• It requires that computer and network assets are only available to
authorized parties.
• computer and network should provide all the designated services in the
presence of all kinds of security attack.

12
 Security criteria...
Integrity
• It requires that messages should be modified or altered only by
authorized parties.
– Modification includes writing, changing, deleting, and creating the
message that is supposed to be transmitted across the network.

• Integrity guarantees that no modification, addition, or deletion is

done to the message;
• The altering of message can be malicious or accidental.

13
 Security criteria...
Confidentiality
• It requires that the message can only be accessible for reading by authorized
parties.
• It also requires that the system should verify the identity of a user.

Authentication
• It means that correct identity is known to communicating parties.
• This property ensures that the parties are genuine not impersonator.

Authorization
• This property gives access rights to different types of users.
– For example a network management can be performed by network
administrator only.

14
 Security attack types
• The attacks can also be classified by the following criteria.
– Passive or active,
– Internal or external,
– At different protocol layers.
Passive vs. active attacks
• A passive attack attempt to learn or make use of the information
without changing the content of the message and disrupting the
operation of the communication.
• Examples of passive attacks are:
-- Eavesdropping , traffic analysis, and traffic monitoring.

15
 Security attack types…

•Active attack attempts to interrupt, modify, delete, or fabricate

messages or information thereby disrupting normal operation of
the network.
•Some examples of active attacks include:
– Jamming, impersonating, modification, denial of service (DoS), and
message replay.

16
 Passive Attacks
• Passive attacks do not affect system resources
– Eavesdropping, monitoring
– The goal of the opponent is to obtain information that is being
transmitted
• Two types of passive attacks
– Release of message contents
– Traffic analysis
• Passive attacks are very difficult to detect
– Message transmission apparently normal
• No alteration of the data
– Emphasis on prevention rather than detection
• By means of encryption
17
 Passive Attacks (1)
Release of Message Contents

18
Passive Attacks (2)
Traffic Analysis

19
 Active Attacks
• Active attacks try to alter system resources or affect
their operation
– Modification of data, or creation of false data
• Four categories
– Masquerade of one entity as some other
– Replay previous message
– Modification of messages
– Denial of service (DoS): preventing normal use
• A specific target or entire network

• Difficult to prevent
– The goal is to detect and recover
20
Active Attacks (1)
Masquerade

21
Active Attacks (2)
Replay

22
 Active Attacks (3)
Modification of Messages

23
Active Attacks (4)
Denial of Service

24
 Security attack types…
Internal vs. External attacks
• External attacks are carried out by hosts that don’t belong to
the network domain, sometimes they are called outsider.
– E.g.it can causes congestion by sending false routing information
thereby causes unavailability of services.
• In case of internal attack, the malicious node from the network
gains unauthorized access and acts as a genuine node and disrupts
the normal operation of nodes.
• They are also known as insider.

25
 Cryptography
Cryptography is the study of secure communications techniques that allow
only the sender and intended recipient of a message to view its contents.
Purpose of Cryptography
•Secure stored information - regardless if access obtained
•Secure transmitted information - regardless if
transmission has been monitored

26
 Services Provided by Cryptography
• Confidentiality
– provides privacy for messages and stored data by hiding
• Message Integrity
– provides assurance to all parties that a message remains unchanged
• Non-repudiation
– Can prove a document came from X even if X denies it
• Authentication
– identifies the origin of a message
– verifies the identity of person using a computer system

27
 Cryptography
• Cryptography has five components:
- Plaintext: This is what you want to encrypt.
- Cipher text: The encrypted output.
- Enciphering or encryption: The process by which plaintext is
converted into cipher text.
- Encryption algorithm: The sequence of data processing steps that go
into transforming plaintext into cipher text.
- Secret Key: is used to set some or all of the various parameters used
by the encryption algorithm.
- Deciphering or decryption: Recovering plaintext from cipher text.
- Decryption algorithm: The sequence of data processing steps that go into
transforming cipher text back into plaintext.

28
 Keys
• A key can be thought of as 0101001110
simply a collection of bits
1011110111
• The more bits, the stronger the 01100101
key
• Keys are tied to specific
encryption algorithms
• Lengths vary depending on the
encryption algorithm
– e.g. 128 bits is long for
some algorithms, but short
for others
29
 Cryptography
• Encryption Overview
– Plain text is converted to cipher text by use of an algorithm
and key.
• Algorithm is publicly known
• Key is held private
– Three Main Categories
• Secret Key
– single key is used to encrypt and decrypt information
• Public/Private Key
– two keys are used: one for encryption (public key) and one for decryption
(private key)
• One-way Function
– information is encrypted to produce a “digest” of the original information
that can be used later to prove its authenticity 30
 Encryption
• Encryption is the process of
taking some data and a key and
feeding it into a function and
getting encrypted data out
• Encrypted data is, in principle,
unreadable unless decrypted Encryption
Function

31
 Decryption
• Decryption is the process of
taking encrypted data and a key
and feeding it into a function and
getting out the original data
– Encryption and decryption
functions are linked

Decryption
Function

32
 Encryption Techniques
Symmetric Encryption
• Encryption and decryption
algorithms that use the same key
are called symmetric
Encrypt
– In this case everyone wanting to read
encrypted data must share the same
key
• Sender and receive have the same
secret key that will encrypt and
decrypt plain text.
• Strength of encryption Decrypt
technique depends on key
length

33
 Encryption Techniques…

• Secret Key (Symmetric)

– Known symmetrical algorithms
• Data Encryption Standard (DES)
– 56 bit key
• Triple DES, DESX
– 168 bit key
• RC2, RC4, RC5
– variable length up to 2048 bits
• IDEA - basis of PGP
– 128 bit key
• Blowfish
– variable length up to 448 bits

34
 Encryption Techniques…
Asymmetric Encryption
• Encryption and decryption
algorithms that use a key pair are
called asymmetric
– Keys are mathematically
linked
• Most common algorithm is the
RSA (Rivest Shamir Adelman)
algorithm with key lengths from
512 to 1024 bits.

35
 Encryption Techniques…

• One-Way Function
– non-reversible “quick” encryption
– produces a fixed length value called a hash or message
digest
– used to authenticate contents of a message
– Common message digest functions
• MD4 and MD5
– produces 128 bit hashes
• SHA
– produces 160 bit hashes

36
 Building Blocks of Encryption Techniques
• Two building blocks of all classical encryption techniques are
substitution and transposition.

• Substitution means replacing an element of the plaintext with an

element of ciphertext.
– each element in the plaintext (bit, letter, group of bits or letters) is
mapped into another element
• Transposition means rearranging the order of appearance of the
elements of the plaintext.
• Transposition is also referred to as permutation.

37
 Cryptography…
• Cryptographic systems can be characterized along these
three independent dimensions.
– type of encryption operations used
• substitution
• transposition
• product
– number of keys used
• single-key, secret-key, symmetric or private
• two-key, asymmetric or public-key

38
 Cryptography...
• Simplified Encryption Model:

39
 Cryptography...
Description
• A sender S wants to transmit message M to a receiver R.
• To protect the message M, the sender first encrypts it into
an intelligible message M’.
• After receipt of M’, R decrypts the message to obtain M.
• M is called the plaintext
 What we want to encrypt

• M’

is called the ciphertext
The encrypted output

40
 Cryptography...
• Mathematical Notation
 Given
P=Plaintext

C=Ciphertext

 C = E (P) Encryption
K

 P = D (C) Decryption
K

41
 Cryptography example:
Caesar cipher
• This is the earliest known example of a substitution cipher.
• Each character of a message is replaced by a character three
position down in the alphabet.

• Shift of letters:
Plain: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Cipher: DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABC

Example
plaintext: are you ready
ciphertext: duh brx uhdgb
42
 Cryptography example:
Caesar cipher
Example: Encipher the message
THIS MESSAGE IS TOP SECRET
• using the ordinary alphabet and a Caesar cipher with a shift of 3.
• When each letter is converted to a number, and we group into blocks of
length 5, we get

19 7 8 18 12 4 18 18 0 6 4 8 18 19 14 15 18 4 2 17 4 19

• Here, we group the items in blocks for readability. After applying the
enciphering transformation, each number becomes
22 10 11 21 15 7 21 21 3 9 7 11 21 22 17 18 21 7 5 20 7 22
• and the ciphertext message is sent as
WKLVP HVVDI HLVWR SVHFU HW
43
WEAKNESSES OF THE CAESAR CIPHER

• The Caesar Cipher is a secret key cryptosystem;

– that is, revealing the enciphering key makes decryption simple.

• In the Caesar cipher, the shift value is the enciphering key.

• Anyone knowing it can immediately decrypt, so it must be
protected from unauthorized persons.

44
 Ciphering with Transposition
• So far we have seen ciphering with substitution.
• We will now talk about a different notion in classical
cryptography: permuting the plaintext.

• This is how a pure permutation cipher could work:

– You write your plaintext message along the rows of a matrix of some
size.
– You generate cipher text by reading along the columns.
– The order in which you read the columns is determined by the
encryption key.

45
 Ciphering with Transposition…

Key: 4 1 3 6 2 5

Plaintext: m e e t m e
a t s q u a
r e g u a r
d e n f o r
g o o d d i
n n e r o k

Ciphertext: eteeonmuaodoesgnoemardgnearriktqufdr

The cipher can be made more secure by performing multiple

rounds of such permutations. 46
 Symmetric and Asymmetric ciphering

• Symmetric: the same key is used to encrypt the data

– Both sides of the communication must have the same key
– Examples: DES, Blowfish, RC2, RC5, IDEA…

• Asymmetric: different keys are used to encrypt and

decrypt the data
– Example: RSA, DH…

47
THE END

48