CHAPTER 1
Security It is protecting property or interests from intrusions or
stealing or wire trapping
System Administration The ability to restrict access or privilege to
the system
Policy in Network and System Administration, what do you call a
clear expression of goals and responses, prepares a site for future
trouble, and documents intent and procedure
Data invulnerability (redundancy) the purpose of a backup copy
Privacy in the issues of security, it is the ability to keep things
private/confidential
Mission-critical systems where human lives are at stake (reliability
and safety).
Real-time system must always be fast enough to cope with any
demand.
Physical threats - weather, natural disaster, bombs, power failures,
etc.
Human threats - stealing, trickery, bribery, spying, sabotage,
accidents.
Software threats - viruses, Trojan horses, logic bombs, denial of
service.
Security the fundamental requirement for security is the ability to
restrict access and privilege to data.
CHAPTER 2
Feedback Regulation part of prevention/correction of security
wherein it continuously acquires assessment from stakeholders.
Design Fault the system does not meet its specifications.
Emergent Fault The system does things which were never planned
or intended.
Policy principle of society, or a set of rules and procedures
Catastrophes a final cause of failure unexpected, external failure.
Human Errors
• Forgetfulness
• Misunderstanding/miscommunication
• Misidentify
• Confusion/stress
• Ignorance
• Carelessness
• Slowness of response
• Random procedural errors
• Systematic procedural errors
• Inability to deal with complexity
• Inability to cooperate with other
A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails,
will stop the entire system from working.
Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) it is a method which is used in critical
situations, such as the nuclear industry and the military.
Fault trees are made of the following: AND, OR, XOR, Incomplete
Cause, Ultimate Cause
CHAPTER 3
In what year did the creation of method of encrypting data for
transmission which has become a standard for the transmission of
sensitive information started? 1977
How many MIT professors build on the work of Diffie and Hellmann
that created the method of encrypting data for transmission? 3
1
Where was the method of encrypting data for transmission
patented? USA
This is known as RSA encryption. The method was patented in the
US and a company was formed to license the technology.
The purpose of a backup is to make a copy of data which is unlikely
to be lost or destroyed by the same act as the original.
There are two kinds of backup
1. Full dump: copies every file on a source medium to a backup
medium.
2. Incremental or differential dump: copies files according to the
level of the dump.
Check sums or Message digests are non-forge able digital signatures
which quickly summarize the contents of a file.
The MD4 Message-Digest Algorithm is a cryptographic hash
function developed by Ronald Rivest in 1990.
The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm is a widely used cryptographic
hash function that produces a 128-bit (16- byte) hash value.
SHA-1 is a cryptographic hash function designed by the National
Security Agency and published by the NIST as a U.S. Federal
Information Processing Standard.
PGP: pretty good privacy Encrypting and decrypting texts, E-mails,
files, directories and whole disk partitions to increase the security of
e-mail communications.
Trust and signatures signing a message is like adding a cryptographic
message digest which verifies the state of the message when you
sent it.
Trusted third party one trusts the database of public keys
corresponding to private keys, trusted database, assure the
authenticity of the keys in their database.
CHAPTER 4
In 1970s was the Data encryption standard (DES) was adopted as a
standard for non-classified government encryption.
1997 was the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) was announced
as a replacement for DES and a competition held for algorithms.
CFEngine A policy-based configuration management system written
by Mark Burgess at Oslo University College. Its primary function is to
provide automated configuration and maintenance of computers,
from a policy specification.
Kerberos Uses DES cryptography to protect sensitive information on
the network. When a user logs on to a host running Kerberos, the
user is issued a ticket from a Ticket Granting Server.
Integrity schemes this is a Flawless data transfer and storage. We
need to understand the issues of error detection and correction.
And Data are not secure to corruption.
Secure Shell has become a DE- facto modern UNIX standard
authentication scheme, using public/private key encryption to verify
the identity of both hosts to one another.
Distributed Computing Environment Digital Equipment Corporation
(DEC, Apollo computer now Compaq) working in collaboration with
others developed their own distributed computing framework
called. This has a similar login authentication scheme to Kerberos.
Active Directory Services Interfaces (ADSI) is a set of open
interfaces that abstract the capabilities of directory services from
different network providers to present a single view for accessing
and managing network resources.
Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) a simple way to include
multiple authentication mechanisms into OS software was
introduced by Sun Microsystems. Sun's pluggable authentication
modules for Solaris have since been adopted by several vendors and
newer GNU/Linux distributions.
Smartcards have been around since the 1980's, particularly in
Europe. They have small, dedicated microprocessor chips
embedded. They typically consist of an 8-bit processor (8051/6805)
and three classes of memory: ROM which holds a program, EPROM
which holds customer data, and RAM (perhaps 16K) for performing
computations.
CHAPTER 5
The access rights of each group or user are taken from the set:
• Read
• Write
• Execute
• Delete
• Change permission
• Change ownership
UNIX introduced a simple model of file permissions in the 70's which
has proven to be quite effective and easy to understand. In recent
times, UNIX has added a modern approach to file permissions using
ACLs, but very few sites have adopted this because of the
complexity.
Process permissions are usually set by access control lists, or on the
basis of understood protocols, such as passwords, keys, or cookies.
Unix setuid programs are an example where the activities of a
program can be changed (by the super user) so as to grant a specific
program the right to operate with a different user-identity and thus
privileges (without authentication). The setgid is a corresponding
mechanism for setting the group ownership of a process. Note that
setuid programs often give more privilege than is necessary and
such programs have been the major cause of security problems on
Unix platforms.
Two basic modes of accessing objects:
a. passive and active,
b. read-only and read-write.
Process permissions are usually set by access control lists, or on the
basis of understood protocols. Give at least three.
a. Passwords
b. Keys
c. cookies
CHAPTER 6
Model a security model is an appraisal of what security means, what
it should cover, what methods we should provide/use to achieve
security.
Policy a security policy is an attitude to security.
Complexity users will become impatient and work around security
(ACL).
Star Property a subject at a given security level must not write to
any object at a lower security level. This property is also known as
the Confinement property.
Discretionary Security Property Use of an access matrix to specify
the discretionary access control.
The Simple Security Property - a subject at a given security level
may not read an object at a higher security level (no read-up).
2
Any change in a system from one state to another is called a
transition.
The basic security theorem is a property of the finite state machine
picture.
CHAPTER 7
Remote Procedure Call (RPC) It is about the execution of functions
on a remote host. It began with Sun Microsystems' (ONC) infra-
structure for NFS, supported by Novell and AT&T. Apollo/Hewlett-
Packard built a rival system (NCS) supported by IBM, DEC (Compaq)
and Microsoft. Recently this systems have come to include the Java
RMI, Microsoft's DCOM and CORBA.
Scope controls or encapsulation Object data are hidden from
general view.
Memory Leak A problem which occurs in long running server
processes is that they gradually use more and more memory,
gradually choking the machine on which they are running. This
occurs in programs which allocate memory but never free it again.
What do you call error?
Static Methods This methods are invoked from the root class rather
than from a local instance of an object within the class. That means
that they can break through internal class security barriers.
Authentication It is Security context establishment, Authorization
and access control with acls and role based access control, Message
protection, Auditing, Non-repudiation.
Methods which are declared constant do not change the state of the
object on which they act. This is a security declaration which enables
to compiler to check the truth of our intention.
A struct datatype is like a class in which all of the members are
public. It is only a conceptual and practical container for related data
objects which makes some program syntax more transparent.
(The Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is a solution to
this problem. It provides an infra- structure which is standardized,
and which conceals the differences between operating systems and
programming languages. It is a generic library service for objects.
CHAPTER 8
Change Software changes either faster than we can keep up, or so
slowly that we do not notice it happening.
Complacency what is a creeping laziness, we stop caring, and we get
fed up with the hard struggle against the forces of evil?
Convenience a security mechanism that the opposite of
convenience and they exact a discipline which some find hard to
uphold.
Spoofing How can we verify the authenticity and integrity of an
information exchange?
Buffer overflows Buffer handling of input streams is an extremely
pernicious problem. If you don't get it right from the beginning,
using a secure standard, it will come back to haunt you again and
again.
Internet banks use a system of authentication which is based on
one-time passwords or signatures, often called "digipass" or
"calculator".
Implicit dependencies: Anything which is hidden from view
(obscure) is something which we are not thinking carefully about. In
order to write secure software, we need to fully understand the
dependencies of the system.
Ambiguity is a term used in writing and mathematics, and under
conditions where information can be understood or interpreted in
more than one way and is distinct from vagueness, which is a
statement about the lack of precision contained or available in the
information.
CHAPTER 9
Sandboxing a security mechanism for separating running programs,
usually in an effort to mitigate system failures or software
vulnerabilities from spreading.
Spoofing attack is when a malicious party impersonates another
device or users on a network in order to launch attacks against
network hosts, steal data, spread malware or bypass access controls
Restricting Privileges Many system processes are started by the
administrator/super user account. System processes therefore often
run with unlimited privilege
Protocol A sequence of operations that ensure protection of data.
Used with a communications protocol, it provides secure delivery of
data between two parties, the term generates that work in tandem
Kernel The central part of an operating system. It manages the
operations of the computer and the hardware – most notably
memory and CPU time.
CHAPTER 10
1. Diffie-Hellman key exchange Most secure ways of sending
information is to use a one-time session key. An example,
a random encryption key which is unique to the session.
2. Secure Mail is point to point, encryption to prevent
eavesdropping of mail it cannot handle non-ASCII data.
3. Originally introduced by Netscape communications in
order to allow secure web transactions is called Secured
Socket Layer (SSL).
4. Transport Layer Security (TLS) A protocol that provides
communication security between client/server
applications that communicates with each other over the
internet.
5. TCP/IP used to govern the connection of the computer
systems to the Internet.
6. A Virtual Private Network extends a private network
across a public network, and enables users to send and
receive data across shared or public networks as if their
computing devices were directly connected to the private
network.
7. IP sec it offers encryption at the IP level. This means that
common TCP attacks, such as sequence guessing or
spoofing attacks cannot occur, since attackers could never
see the contents of traveling packets.
8. DNS sec stands for Domain Name System Security
Extensions, and it is a technology used to protect
information on the Domain Name System (DNS) which is
used on IP networks.
CHAPTER 11
Intrusion detection it is a device or software application that
monitors a network or systems for malicious activity or policy
violations.
The aim of an intrusion detection system is to detect break-ins in
progress so that something can be done about them.
Two types of intrusion detection
1. Rule based intrusion detection: testing for specific
occurrences, e.g. seeing whether a particular private port
is accessed.
2. Statistical anomaly detection: looking for anything out of
the ordinary, by collecting data on what `ordinary' is.
Anomaly detection a very interesting idea which might be used both
in fault- diagnosis and security intrusion detection is the idea of
anomaly detection. In anomaly detection we are looking for
anything abnormal.
Port Scanning a common way for hackers to gather information
about a network is to perform a port scan. A port scanner is simply a
program which attempts to establish a network connection to every
single port number 1, 2,3,4,5....5000… on every host on the network.
Computer Immune System It is a sobering thought that the most
efficient intrusion blocking and detection system which exists is in
the human body.
CHAPTER 12
Zones of security clearance the first thing to decide is the nature of
the organization we are trying to protect. Many companies, like
banks or large cooperate empires require many levels of security.
Information is provided on a need to know basis. There might be
physical security checkpoints and logical security checkpoints.
The future of security
• The need for security has always existed
• The security problem will never be solved because it all has to do
with trust.
• Every security problem has its roots in trust
• We can use technology to move trust from place to place, but we
can never avoid the final judgment.
The future of security is you
• Go and spread good practices by setting a good example.
• Are you your own worst enemy when it comes to security?
• What are your bad habits?
• Where do you place your trust?