Book Image

Network Protocols for Security Professionals

By : Yoram Orzach, Deepanshu Khanna
5 (1)
Book Image

Network Protocols for Security Professionals

5 (1)
By: Yoram Orzach, Deepanshu Khanna

Overview of this book

With the increased demand for computer systems and the ever-evolving internet, network security now plays an even bigger role in securing IT infrastructures against attacks. Equipped with the knowledge of how to find vulnerabilities and infiltrate organizations through their networks, you’ll be able to think like a hacker and safeguard your organization’s network and networking devices. Network Protocols for Security Professionals will show you how. This comprehensive guide gradually increases in complexity, taking you from the basics to advanced concepts. Starting with the structure of data network protocols, devices, and breaches, you’ll become familiar with attacking tools and scripts that take advantage of these breaches. Once you’ve covered the basics, you’ll learn about attacks that target networks and network devices. Your learning journey will get more exciting as you perform eavesdropping, learn data analysis, and use behavior analysis for network forensics. As you progress, you’ll develop a thorough understanding of network protocols and how to use methods and tools you learned in the previous parts to attack and protect these protocols. By the end of this network security book, you’ll be well versed in network protocol security and security countermeasures to protect network protocols.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1: Protecting the Network – Technologies, Protocols, Vulnerabilities, and Tools
7
Part 2: Network, Network Devices, and Traffic Analysis-Based Attacks
12
Part 3: Network Protocols – How to Attack and How to Protect

HTTPS protocol behavior, data structure, and analysis

Now, the major problem with the HTTP protocol is that the data transmission is completely unencrypted, which means an attacker can steal, alter, or view the ongoing traffic between the client and the server. To capture, there are many tools available, such as Wireshark, Fiddler, HTTPView, and Network Analyzer. But for the best view, Wireshark is much more compatible and user-friendly to use, so we will also be using that for our testing. Let’s demonstrate HTTP’s weakness using Wireshark:

Figure 14.4 – A sniffed HTTP request

As shown in Figure 14.4, Wireshark captured the unencrypted login request transmitted via an unsecured HTTP channel.

To prevent this, another layer of security was added by introducing the Transport Layer Security (TLS), formerly known as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL). So, let’s understand this with a practical demonstration:

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