Network Security

• Computer security in a networked context. In today's lecture, we concentrate on this problem.
   
  
  • Computer systems are subject to attack originating from the network
  • Extends well known security approaches adopted for protection of non-networked systems and adds network-specific mechanisms
  • No general solutions: any solution which provides perfect security seriously degrades usefulness of network...
  
   
  
• Security of information in transit across the network. This is covered in the next lecture.
   
  
  • Problem is largely due to the bad guys' ability to observe (capture) packets travelling across the network, and possibly an ability to introduce spurious packets.
  • Solution is usually in some form of encryption, see next lectures.