| [Page 398] In practice, the effectiveness of a countermeasure often depends on how it is used; the best safe in the world is worthless if no one remembers to close the door. Computers at Risk: Safe Computing in the Information Age, National Research Council, 1991 Increased use of computer and communications networks, computer literacy, and dependence on information technology heighten U.S. industry's risk of losing proprietary information to economic espionage. In part to reduce the risk, industry is more frequently using hardware and software with encryption capabilities. Communications Privacy: Federal Policy and Actions. General Accounting Office Report GAO/OSI-94-2, November 1993 In the first two parts, we examined various ciphers and their use for confidentiality, authentication, key exchange, and related functions. Part Three surveys important network security tools and applications that make use of these functions. These applications can be used across a single network, a corporate intranet, or the Internet. Road Map for Part Three Chapter 14: Authentication Applications Chapter 14 is a survey of two of the most important authentication specifications in current use. Kerberos is an authentication protocol based on conventional encryption that has received widespread support and is used in a variety of systems X.509 specifies an authentication algorithm and defines a certificate facility. The latter enables users to obtain certificates of public keys so that a community of users can have confidence in the validity of the public keys. This facility is employed as a building block in a number of applications.
[Page 399] Chapter 15: Electronic Mail Security The most heavily used distributed application is electronic mail, and there is increasing interest in providing authentication and confidentiality services as part of an electronic mail facility. Chapter 15 looks at the two approaches likely to dominate electronic mail security in the near future. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a widely used scheme that does not depend on any organization or authority. Thus, it is as well suited to individual, personal use as it is to incorporation in network configurations operated by organizations. S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) was developed specifically to be an Internet Standard. Chapter 16: IP Security The Internet Protocol (IP) is the central element in the Internet and private intranets. Security at the IP level, accordingly, is important to the design of any internetwork-based security scheme. Chapter 16 looks at the IP security scheme that has been developed to operate both with the current IP and the emerging next-generation IP, known as IPv6. Chapter 17: Web Security The explosive growth in the use of the World Wide Web for electronic commerce and to disseminate information has generated the need for strong Web-based security. Chapter 17 provides a survey of this important new security area and looks at two key standards: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Secure Electronic Transaction (SET). |
|