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

Authentication basics and protocols

Authentication is a process that identifies a person, device, or software process that's accessing data or information. Authorization is a process that grants access rights to perform actions on data or information.

There are three types of authentication mechanisms. These are what you know, what you have, and what you are:

  • What you know: Usually user and password authentication
  • What you have: Usually smart cards and card readers
  • What you are: Biometrics such as fingerprint or eye retina scanning

There are several resources that we usually access:

  • The organization networks. This is usually done with an SSL/TLS-VPN or IPSec VPN, which we will talk about later in this chapter.
  • External web services (bank accounts, social networks, and so on). This is usually done with HTTPS, which uses SSL/TLS.
  • Internal access to organization resources. This is provided by Microsoft or Linux mechanisms, and RADIUS/TACACS...