La Trobe University, Bendigo

Department of Information Technology

Computing 205/406/IT8: Network Architectures

Assignment 3 1996

1. Investigate some of the electronic payment (electronic cash) systems which have been designed for payment for goods and services on the Web.

2. Investigate some of the schemes which have been proposed for "content restriction" on the World Wide Web, such as the "Safe Surfing" initiative. Are any of these related to the US Government's "V-chip"? Should they be? Serious philosophical discussion required.

3. You have been retained as a consultant by a small(ish - you decide how big) Central Victorian business to advise them on their options for obtaining Internet access. They initially want straightforward email service, but wish to keep their options open in terms of future use of the net, in particular the possibility of establishing an "electronic storefront" for Internet commerce. Write a report detailing their options, using (as much as possible) real world costings for the proposed services.

4. This question is about network security. Your task is to investigate public key cryptosystems. In particular, you should investigate PGP (Phil Zimmerman's Pretty Good Privacy package), available on the departmental Unix systems. You are required to create a personal PGP public/private key pair, and use your private key to encrypt an email message to your lecturer. You must then provide your public key to the lecturer in such a way that the lecturer is certain of the origin of the encrypted (or signed) message. You should then use PGP encrypted (or signed) electronic mail to submit a report on your findings to the lecturer. This report should cover the basic operation of public key systems, a description of the procedures required to distribute public keys in a safe and trustworthy manner, and possibly a discussion of the legal, political and commercial issues implied by the existence of PGP. You might also mention something about the US laws regarding exportation of encryption technology.

5. This is a question for the programmers. The HTTP protocol uses TCP, at port number 80, for transfer of HTML documents. Your task is to write a client program (preferably on Unix) which opens a socket to a remote host and issues the HTTP command to fetch a specified HTML document. The document should be displayed on the terminal. A simple implementation will display the HTML file without attempting to interpret the markup tags. A more complete program might interpret some of the markup: I'd suggest some of the simpler textual markup such as <p> and <hr>. See your lecturer for some ideas on this question.

6. As before, another topic with the explicit prior approval of your lecturer.

Due Date: 14th June 1996, 5pm, absolutely no extensions under any circumstances.
Lecturer and tutor: Phil Scott, 447277, pscott@ironbark