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

Encryption basics and protocols

Encryption is the process of converting information that can be read by everyone – that is, cleartext or plaintext – into secret information called ciphertext that can only be accessed by authorized users.

Encryption requires an algorithm and a key. The algorithm is a mathematical procedure made up of a series of calculations, while the key is a string of bits. The smarter the algorithm is and the longer the key is, the more difficult it will be to break it.

Services provided by encryption

Encryption is a service that hides the content of the data. Encryption does not authenticate the source of the data, it does not hide the source and destination of the data, and it does not check the integrity of the data. For these purposes, we have other mechanisms that we talk about later in this chapter:

Figure 3.1 – Sending information during encryption

An example of the information that is seen and hidden...