Symmetric key encryption

Discuss about the Computer Security And Encryption.

Symmetric key encryption

Encryption of data has become an important part of data storage in every sphere. The messages and files which is being sent form one person to another using the internet or any other mode of transfer should have proper security and it must be kept in mind that the message is sent to the actual recipient of it and not in someone else’s hands. In the method of symmetric key encryption, there is a separate key for each of the computer system (Sindhuja & Devi, 2014). The key is used to help in the encryption procedure and then transfer it over to the receiver of the message using the network they are connected to. During the process of sending the message over to the receiver of the message it is important to know which computer system is going to interact with the message. This would mean that the key for the decryption of the message needs to be installed into the system or else the receiver will not be able to view the message. The drawback of using this process is that the transferring of the key is the most important aspect of the message relay. If the key falls into the wrong hand or is sent to a wrong receiver then the whole message system is compromised (Bashyam et al., 2015). The use of symmetric key means that both the sender and the receiver of the message system has to know a single encryption key which will help them to encrypt and decrypt the message and continue exchanging information. The use of the same key is the most beneficial dorm of messaging system in the symmetric key encryption.

Public key encryption

The method of public key encryption is often referred to as the system of cryptographic exchange of messages with the help of two un-identical keys – a public key shared among the users and a private key confidential to a single person in the network (Abdalla, Benhamouda & Pointcheval, 2016). The public key is known to everyone in the network they are connected to and the private key is only share with the person on the receiving end of the message. The security aspect of the use of this mode of message sharing is the generation of the private key if someone gets to know what the public key is. Looking from the point of view of the hackers it would be practically impossible for them to generate the private key which would help them in decrypting the message (Xu et al., 2013).

Public key encryption

Hashing

The use of hashing function is the available in all the applications which are using information system as a part of their system (Lin et al., 2014). The use of this technology is important from the point of view of the user. The technology offers security measures to the use of the internet and thee communication medium that the user is using. The hash function is basically a mathematical function which had the property of converting the input value into a much more compressed value of the same type. The hashed value returned is termed as message digest or hash value.

Technique Used For Confidentiality and Authentication

The most popular implementation of the cryptography standard is the use of Hashing. This process can directly ensure the process of confidentiality and authentication (Xia et al., 2014). In the world of computer system the use of confidentiality and authentication plays a very important role from the aspect of data storage. Everyone on the same network has to keep their data safe from the hackers and others on the same network. Two direct application of the hash function are discusses below:

1. Password Storage: the storage of password is integral part of keeping information safe. If the passwords fall into the wrong hands then valuable information may get stolen from the individual. Hashing of the passwords make it unreadable to the hackers who are prying into the individuals passwords (Bhullar, Pawar & Kumar, 2016). After hashing even if the data is not hidden then the hacker will only be able to see hashes. Logging into the system using these information or decrypting the information will be next to impossible for the hacker. This is due to the fact that the hashing is done with the help of pre image resistance.
2. Integrity Data check: the data checking integrity can be defined as the most common application of the working of hashing function in the process of generating the checksums o the data files in the servers. The integrity check can help the user to detect the changes in the original file. The concept does not provide and sort of positive assurance related to keeping the originality of the data file in the server (Patel, & Kasat, 2017). The use of this concept can be helpful for the user who knows that there is a change in the originality of the data.

Denial of service attack is a passive attack on the network server where the server or the network traffic is flooded with unrequired resources which results in the network to slow down. The result makes the whole network to slow down and the resources are not able to be accessed (Tan et al., 2014). The server gets congested with requests from different websites which eventually makes the server to fall down. The server crash then does not let any work to happen which can be resolved by rebooting the whole server. There are some steps which can be followed by an organization to stop the process of denial of service attack:

Monitoring the traffic level of the network: the main working procedure of the denial of service attack is the dumping of unrequired resources into the data stream of the network. This produces an increased amount of requests to different servers and floods the network with the acknowledgements form the requests (Merlo et al., 2014). The best way to implement the stopping procedure for the denial of service attack is to use a monitoring system of the network that is connected to the server. This way if there is a hike in the traffic requests the administrator monitoring the server will be able to check the system and stop before the attack even begins. The administrator has to keep up with the amount of requests that will be getting generated and instantly shut the server down as soon as there is a hike in the amount of requests. The administrator can also set up an upper limit in the threshold limit which will help is directly disconnecting the systems from the server.

Hashing

Produce a risk mitigation plan for the attack: the main aspect of the process is to stop the attack as soon as it happens. The other way is to redirect the attack procedure to another server which would be able to take up the denial off service attack. Though the use of this process is not foolproof but it might help in the mitigation of the risk that can be associated with the attack. The server can be configured separately which will be redirected to when there is a high rise in the traffic flow in the network (Guo et al., 2015). Log data’s should be dumped regularly after correct monitoring of the data to ensure that the network is not being misused by the employees and also to check whether there are any kind of other IP connecting the network. There should be a confirmation procedure in the server which will help in obtaining the DNS time to live for the systems connected to the network which might help in understanding which of the system are vulnerable to the attack.

Rules of working in secure areas

1. Integrity of physical security:

• Closing of door after the authorized person has entered.
• Not to leave any door open or unguarded in the working area.
• Debar from unauthorized and unsupervised access of data by the technicians and maintenance workers (Peppard & Ward, 2016).

1. Integrity of environmental security:

• No eating of foods and beverages in the work environment.
• Not to store hazardous materials in the work environment
• Use of good fire protection mechanism.
• Mechanical failures should be reported at once (Pearlson, Saunders & Galletta, 2016).

1. Authorization of different activities:

• Approval from the ITS is necessary to go on with any changes in the work.
• Risk mitigation document should be created and followed
• Equipment cabinet should not be opened without authorization.
• Damaged system and materials should be looked after at once (Chang et al., 2015).

Reduction in the unauthorized use of desktop PC

Security protocol with respect to computer system can be defined as restricting the use of the system with an unauthorized access. The task of securing a system is challenging. Hackers has always been considered to have the upper hand in the technological aspect of accessing such files and system with unauthorized access (Bila et al., 2015). Though the best decision would be the use of security measures to secure the system. The following are some of the ways which can be used by the administrator to secure the access of the computer system connected to a network:

1. Regular system update and upgrades: the use of the operating system is to help the user ot work freely on the system. Though this help can become a bane when the system updates are not installed on the correct time and the hackers can find the backdoor to the system using the codes lagging due to the updates not being done (Bila et al., 2015).
2. Web browser: to stay connected to the internet it is important for the user to use a web browser. There are many options available in the market which would help the user to stay connected. They are mainly open source in nature and can be changed by anyone with the knowledge of coding. This becomes a drawback as hackers can change the coding of the web browser and send the pirated version to the users as an update. This would make any data entry into the web browser be logged remotely and the web browser may also be used as a secret route inside the system network thus getting access to the files on the server (Bila et al., 2015).
3. Pirated software’s: the use of pirated software’s has increased in the recent times. Due to the high pricing of the original software users often tend to look for cheap or practically free. This makes the pirated software to pose a threat to the system network. The most notorious attacks are launched from java based programs and servers. This is the reason that the Homeland Security asks to disable the java updates on their systems (Pearlson, Saunders & Galletta, 2016).
4. Malware and virus: a simple virus is able to do tasks that any normal person with the full access to a system cannot do. This is the reason virus and malwares are dangerous for any system. Some of virus in the system often try not to damage the hardware and just damage the files and on the system and eventually spread to the server. A spyware can get activated when the file is opened in the system. The virus can also get downloaded when the user suddenly clicks on any pop up box from the browser (Pearlson, Saunders & Galletta, 2016).

The installation of an intrusion detection system helps in monitoring any unknown source of entry into the system. The result then can be analyzed to find any suspicious pattern in the system which might imply that someone was trying to get into the system form outside (Lin et al., 2014). The use of an intrusion detection system can be termed as a passive help to the monitoring of the network. It would just be suggesting the organization that there had been an unauthorized access to the network from outside. There are two ways in which the working can be done; first by the use of ID filtering and the second is to have packet stream analysis of the traffic data.

Technique Used For Confidentiality and Authentication

Deep packet inspection (DPI)

The use of deep packet inspection does not imply only to the checking of the header and the footer of the packets of information that is travelling to and from the server. The DPI has to look at every single packet as a whole and check if it legal or not (Bremler-Barr et al., 2014). This is the process of decision making procedure used by the firewall to sieve out the wrong and illegal packets from the stream of data. The DPI checks into the packets passing through the stream and does the decision making procedure and then finally allows the correct packet through the stream.

The Deep packet inspection can be used to enforce a strong foundation in the security aspect of the organizations servers. The officer is responsible for the checking of the packets one by one and telling the firewall or the system that the packet is not illegal. The use of different network management tools can be also used to filter out the different packets from the data stream (Hofstede et al., 2014). These tools can also be used to provide better insight to the packets that are being filtered. They can eventually make up a report for the network usage and the informations which has been requested and analyzed. The data can also be later used for forensic analysis of the network.

Packet Stream Analysis

The use of a packet stream analysis can be done in both legitimate way and illegitimately. During the use of the technology in a legitimate way transmission error and network and data can be tracked (Lim et al., 2014). The main objective of this technology is the use of network detection. The process of using packet capture can be compared to process of telephone tapping in sense of detecting any problem in the computer network. The implementation of this process can help in the troubleshooting of nay network problem.

The use of a packet sniffer in the network can be used for a variety of network procedure and analysis. This can be used to find an intrusion in the network of the system. Thus it can be said that the method can be used to serve the primary process of the network (Martin, Brito & Fetzer, 2014).

References

Abdalla, M., Benhamouda, F., & Pointcheval, D. (2016). Public-key encryption indistinguishable under plaintext-checkable attacks. IET Information Security, 10(6), 288-303.

Secure Networks

Bashyam, S. L. R., Shankar, K., Kadiyala, S., & Abuzneid, A. S. (2015). Hybrid cryptography using symmetric key encryption. Research Gate, (6).

Bhullar, R. K., Pawar, L., & Kumar, V. (2016, October). A novel prime numbers based hashing technique for minimizing collisions. In Next Generation Computing Technologies (NGCT), 2016 2nd International Conference on (pp. 522-527). IEEE.

Bila, N., Wright, E. J., Lara, E. D., Joshi, K., Lagar-Cavilla, H. A., Park, E., … & Satyanarayanan, M. (2015). Energy-oriented partial desktop virtual machine migration. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 33(1), 2.

Bremler-Barr, A., Harchol, Y., Hay, D., & Koral, Y. (2014, December). Deep packet inspection as a service. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM International on Conference on emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (pp. 271-282). ACM.

Chang, M. J., Jung, J. K., Park, M. W., & Chung, T. M. (2015, July). Strategy to reinforce security in telemedicine services. In Advanced Communication Technology (ICACT), 2015 17th International Conference on (pp. 170-175). IEEE.

Guo, Y., Ten, C. W., Hu, S., & Weaver, W. W. (2015, February). Modeling distributed denial of service attack in advanced metering infrastructure. In Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT), 2015 IEEE Power & Energy Society (pp. 1-5). IEEE.

Hofstede, R., ?eleda, P., Trammell, B., Drago, I., Sadre, R., Sperotto, A., & Pras, A. (2014). Flow monitoring explained: From packet capture to data analysis with netflow and ipfix. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 16(4), 2037-2064.

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Lin, G., Shen, C., Shi, Q., Van den Hengel, A., & Suter, D. (2014). Fast supervised hashing with decision trees for high-dimensional data. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 1963-1970).

Lin, Y. D., Lin, P. C., Prasanna, V. K., Chao, H. J., & Lockwood, J. W. (2014). Guest editorial deep packet inspection: Algorithms, hardware, and applications. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 32(10), 1781-1783.

Martin, A., Brito, A., & Fetzer, C. (2014, May). Scalable and elastic realtime click stream analysis using streammine3g. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems (pp. 198-205). ACM.

Merlo, A., Migliardi, M., Gobbo, N., Palmieri, F., & Castiglione, A. (2014). A denial of service attack to UMTS networks using SIM-less devices. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 11(3), 280-291.

Patel, F. S., & Kasat, D. (2017, February). Hashing based indexing techniques for content based image retrieval: A survey. In Innovative Mechanisms for Industry Applications (ICIMIA), 2017 International Conference on (pp. 279-283). IEEE.

Pearlson, K. E., Saunders, C. S., & Galletta, D. F. (2016). Managing and Using Information Systems, Binder Ready Version: A Strategic Approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Peppard, J., & Ward, J. (2016). The strategic management of information systems: Building a digital strategy. John Wiley & Sons.

Sindhuja, K., & Devi, P. S. (2014). A symmetric key encryption technique using genetic algorithm. International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies, 5(1), 414-6.

Tan, Z., Jamdagni, A., He, X., Nanda, P., & Liu, R. P. (2014). A system for denial-of-service attack detection based on multivariate correlation analysis. IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems, 25(2), 447-456.

Xia, R., Pan, Y., Lai, H., Liu, C., & Yan, S. (2014, July). Supervised Hashing for Image Retrieval via Image Representation Learning. In AAAI (Vol. 1, pp. 2156-2162).

Xu, P., Jin, H., Wu, Q., & Wang, W. (2013). Public-key encryption with fuzzy keyword search: A provably secure scheme under keyword guessing attack. IEEE Transactions on computers, 62(11), 2266-2277.