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

Public key infrastructure and certificate authorities

Public key infrastructure (PKI) defines the architecture for secured communications between users. PKI defines a certificate authority (CA) that contains several attributes to be used between users that establish communications.

PKI provides several services:

  • Authentication: To prove to each side that the other side is who it claims to be
  • Integrity: To prove that data has not been changed during transmission
  • Confidentiality: To prove that no one can read the data during transmission

PKI standardized the process of using certificates and using private and public keys for secure communications between entities.

PKI is mostly used to connect to web servers using Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS). In this section, we will describe the process and, in the SSL/TLS and Proxies section, later in this chapter, we will get to the bits and bytes.

First, let's see how a client connects...