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

L2-based attacks

With Layer 2 attacks, we are referring to attacks that interfere with the normal operation of the OSI Layer-2 network protocols. When in this category, we have LAN switching that includes MAC learning, VLANs, STP/RSTP, MAC security, and other attacks on the Layer-2 functionality of the network. Let's examine some examples and learn how to protect against them.

MAC flooding

LAN switches contain a MAC table that holds all of the MAC addresses that were learned by the switch. In Chapter 2, Network Protocol Structures and Operations, we learned about the way switches operate, and we discovered that a LAN switch learns all of the MAC addresses that are connected to it, and forwards frames to these destination MAC addresses only to the physical ports the devices with these MAC addresses are connected to. Since every switch has a limitation in terms of the number of MAC addresses that it can learn, when the MAC address table is filled, the switch will not be able...