Security on the Web
How do you secure something that is changing faster than you can fix it? The Internet has had security problems since it’s earliest days as a pure research project. Today, after several years and orders of magnitude of growth, it still has security problems. The Internet is being used for a purpose for which it had never intended to be used for. It is somewhat ironic that the early Internet was design as a prototype for a high-availability command and control network that could resist outages resulting from an enemy attack, yet it cannot resist college undergraduates. The problem is that the attackers are on, and make up apart of, the network they are attacking. Designing a system that is capable of resisting attack from within, while still growing and evolving at a rapid pace, is probably impossible. Deep infrastructure changes are needed, and once you have achieved a certain amount of size, the sheer inertia of the installed base may make it impossible to apply fixes.The challenge for the security industry is growing. With the electronic commerce spreading over the Internet, there are new issues being developed everyday such as non-repudiation that will need to be solved. Financial institution
As the number of sites requiring simple authentication grows, so does the number of passwords that each user must maintain. In fact, users are often required to have several different passwords for systems in their workplace, for personal accounts, for special accounts relating to payroll and vacation, and so on. It is not uncommon for users to have more than six sites they visit that require passwords. The idea behind Digital IDs is that they are entered into the browser and then are automatically sent when users connect to sites requiring personal certificates. Unfortunately, the only practical effect is to make impersonating users on the network only a little bit more difficult. In the early days of networking, firewalls were intended less as security devices than as a means of preventing broken networking software or hardware from crashing wide-area networks. In those days, malformed packets or bogus routes frequently crashed systems and disrupted servers. Desperate network managers installed screening systems to reduce the damage that could happen if a subnet’s routing tables got confused or if a system’s Ethernet card malfunctioned. When companies began connecting to what is now the Internet, firewalls acted as a means of isolating networks to provide security as well as enforce, otherwise known as an administrative boundary. Early hackers were not very sophisticated; neither were early firewalls. Class 2 Digital IDs require third party confirmation of name, address, and other personal information related to the user, and they are available only to residents of the United States and Canada. The information provided to Verisign is checked against a consumer database maintained by Equifax. To protect against insiders at Verisign issuing bogus Digital IDs, a hardware device is used to generate the certificates. New capabilities were added to satisfy the growing demand for features without carefully considering the impact on security. As a general-purpose, scripts were introduced on both the client and the server sides of the Web. It did not take long for the Web to move from the scientific community to the commercial world. For then the dangers of accidental and malicious abuse grew. At this point, the security threats became much more serious. The incentive for malicious attackers to exploit vulnerabilities in the underlying technologies is at an all-time high. This is indeed frightening when we consider what attackers of computer systems have accomplished when their only incentive was fun and personal enjoyment while boosting their egos. When business and profit are at stake, we cannot assume anything less than the most dedicated and resourceful attackers typing their utmost will and determination to steal, cheat, and perform mischievous attacks against their pray (users of the Web). Cryptography is at the heart of computer and network security. The important cryptographic functions are encryption, decryption, one-way hashing, and digital signatures. Ciphers are divided into two categories, symmetric and asymmetric, or public-key systems. Symmetric ciphers are functions where the same key is used for encryption and decryption. Public-key systems can be used for encryption, but they are also useful for key agreement and digital signatures. Key-agreement protocols enable two parties to compute a secret key, even in the face of an eavesdropper. There are simple and advanced methods for ensuring browser security and protecting user privacy. The more simple techniques are user certification schemes, which rely on digital IDs. Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer allow users to obtain and use personal certificates. Curre
Some topics in this essay:
Digital IDs,
UNIX Windows,
Server Administration,
Web Web,
Web Sina,
CarPartscom Virtual,
Internet Issuance,
Revenue Service,
IDEA DES,
Initialization Vector,
digital ids,
proxy firewalls,
types firewalls,
electronic commerce,
symmetric ciphers,
block mixed plaintext,
plaintext block block,
graphical user,
name password,
transacting business,
connecting internet,
rapid growth,
types firewalls proxy,
main types firewalls,
mixed plaintext block,
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Approximate Word count = 2474
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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