Course: Cryptography and Network Security

Code: CS-34310
Branch: M.C.A - 4th Semester
Lecture – 2: Security Basics

Faculty & Coordinator : Dr. J Sathish Kumar (JSK)

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad,
Prayagraj-211004
Security Trends
Security Trends
Security Trends
 Security Goals
• We are living in the information age.
• We need to keep information about every aspect of our lives.
• In other words, information is an asset that has a value like any other
asset.
• As an asset, information needs to be secured from attacks.
• To be secured, information needs to be hidden from unauthorized
access (confidentiality), protected from unauthorized change
(integrity), and available to an authorized entity when it is needed
(availability).
SECURITY GOALS
 SECURITY GOALS
• Confidentiality
• Need to protect our confidential
information.
• An organization needs to guard against those
malicious actions that endanger the confidentiality
of its information
• In the military, concealment of sensitive information is the major concern.
• In industry, hiding some information from competitors is crucial to the operation of the
organization.
• In banking, customers’ accounts need to be kept secret.
• Confidentiality not only applies to the storage of the information, it also applies to the
transmission of information.
• When we send a piece of information to be stored in a remote computer or when we retrieve a
piece of information from a remote computer, we need to conceal it during transmission
 SECURITY GOALS
• Integrity
• Information needs to be changed constantly.
• In a bank, when a customer deposits or withdraws
money, the balance of her account needs to be
changed.
• Integrity means that changes need to be done only by authorized entities and
through authorized mechanisms.
• Integrity violation is not necessarily the result of a malicious act.
• An interruption in the system, such as a power surge, may also create
unwanted changes in some information.
 SECURITY GOALS
• Availability
• The information created and stored by an organization
needs to be available to authorized entities.
• Information is useless if it is not available.
• Information needs to be constantly changed, which means it
must be accessible to authorized entities.
• The unavailability of information is just as harmful for an organization as the
lack of confidentiality or integrity.
• Imagine what would happen to a bank if the customers could not access their
accounts for transactions.
ATTACKS
ATTACKS
 Attacks Threatening Confidentiality
• Snooping
• Snooping refers to unauthorized access to or
interception of data.
• For example, a file transferred through the
Internet may contain confidential information.
• An unauthorized entity may intercept the
transmission and use the contents for her own
benefit.
• To prevent snooping, the data can be made
non-intelligible to the intercepter by using
encipherment techniques
 Attacks Threatening Confidentiality
• Traffic Analysis
• Although encipherment of data may make it
nonintelligible for the intercepter, one can obtain some
other type information by monitoring online traffic.

• For example, he/she can find the electronic address (such

as the e-mail address) of the sender or the receiver.

• He/She can collect pairs of requests and responses to

help him/her guess the nature of transaction.
 Attacks Threatening Integrity
• Modification
• After intercepting or accessing information, the attacker
modifies the information to make it beneficial to herself.

• For example, a customer sends a message to a bank to do

some transaction.

• The attacker intercepts the message and changes the type

of transaction to benefit herself.

• Note that sometimes the attacker simply deletes or delays

the message to harm the system or to benefit from it.
 Attacks Threatening Integrity
• Masquerading
• Masquerading, or spoofing, happens when the attacker
impersonates somebody else.
• For example, an attacker might steal the bank card and PIN
of a bank customer and pretend that she is that customer.
• Sometimes the attacker pretends instead to be the receiver
entity.
• For example, a user tries to contact a bank, but another site
pretends that it is the bank and obtains some information
from the user.
 Attacks Threatening Integrity
• Replaying
• Replaying is another attack.

• The attacker obtains a copy of a message sent by a user

and later tries to replay it.

• For example, a person sends a request to her bank to ask

for payment to the attacker, who has done a job for her.

• The attacker intercepts the message and sends it again to

receive another payment from the bank.
 Attacks Threatening Integrity
• Repudiation
• This type of attack is different from others because it is performed by one of the two parties in the
communication: the sender or the receiver.
• The sender of the message might later deny that she has sent the message;
• The receiver of the message might later deny that he has received the message.
• An example of denial by the sender would be a bank customer asking her bank to send some money to a
third party but later denying that she has made such a request.
• An example of denial by the receiver could occur when a person buys a product from a manufacturer and
pays for it electronically, but the manufacturer later denies having received the payment and asks to be
paid.
 Attacks Threatening Availability
• Denial of Service
• Denial of service (DoS) is a very common attack.
• It may slow down or totally interrupt the service of a
system.
• The attacker can use several strategies to achieve this.
• He/She might send so many bogus requests to a server
that the server crashes because of the heavy load.
• The attacker might intercept and delete a server’s
response to a client, making the client to believe that
the server is not responding.
• The attacker may also intercept requests from the
clients, causing the clients to send requests many
times and overload the system.
 Passive Versus Active Attacks
• Passive Attacks
• In a passive attack, the attacker’s goal is just to obtain information.
• This means that the attack does not modify data or harm the system.
• However, the attack may harm the sender or the receiver of the message.
• Attacks that threaten confidentiality, snooping and traffic analysis, are passive
attacks.
• The revealing of the information may harm the sender or receiver of the
message, but the system is not affected.
• For this reason, it is difficult to detect this type of attack until the sender or
receiver finds out about the leaking of confidential information.
• Passive attacks, however, can be prevented by encipherment of the data.
 Passive Versus Active Attacks
• Active Attacks
• An active attack may change the data or harm the system.
• Attacks that threaten the integrity and availability are active
attacks.
• Active attacks are normally easier to detect than to prevent,
because an attacker can launch them in a variety of ways.
Passive Versus Active Attacks