Network security has been a topic of extensive research for a long time. With newer technologies coming to the field and more intelligent hackers becoming active, providing security to our data is a never ending battle. Who could forget the two famous tales of Network security breach? Some unknown hackers stole the US government databases and then the Citibank lost $10 millions because of a group of fraud hackers. With exponential growth of internet and networking, online security and network security have become more essential when a computer is connected to a public network like the Internet. Because, all the data transmitted in this process is exposed to possible hackers and thus are vulnerable.

The factors that influence the mechanisms used for securing data on networks include many aspects. They are the network’s architecture, security components, security administration setup and network security awareness in the organization.

Network security, including privacy of data or messages transmitting, should provide four services- viz. authentication of communicating parties, integrity of data, non-repudiation, and appropriate authorization. In fact, these are the objectives or the goals a network security system.

Two parties participating in a communication across a particular computer network would also want protection from the secret eavesdropper. The sender and receiver demand confidentiality, i.e. the transmitted messages make sense to only the sender and receiver. This is achieved through cryptography.

Some form of media carries data from one destination to another. The media may be telephone lines, satellite or microwaves but these Medias can easily be accessed by anyone to read the transmitted data. This problem is tackled by ‘cryptography’. The word, ‘cryptography’ in Greek means secret writing. Cryptography is at the heart of network security. It is something like codes used by intelligence agencies for various combing operations. This technology of cryptography has been used in history of right from Roman Times to the Second World War and more recently from the cold war days to the age of information superhighway.

Let us explain the basic principal of cryptography in very simple words. In cryptography, the original data or massage at the source is encrypt or encode using well defined algorithms and then decrypt or decode the cipher text to plaintext at the destination using a reverse algorithm. These encryption and decryption algorithms are referred to as ciphers. The ciphers are public and it can be available to anyone, but the keys are secret. The encrypting algorithm produces a different cipher text with a different key, which adds to another layer of security, therefore the malicious person will need to know the key.

Network security looks to be a simple term. It is also very appealing to all of us but this term carries a lot of meaning and there are various facets of network security. Perhaps there is no absolute definition of the term network security because the concept of network security will differ according to the security policy of the user or the organization.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Network Security, Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.