La Trobe University, Bendigo
Division of Information Technology
BITCNE: Computer Networks
Assignment 3 1999
New questions may appear on this assignment sheet
Answer ONE ONLY of the following questions.
- There are a variety of electronic payment (or
electronic cash) systems designed for payment for
goods and services on the Web. Not many of these have, to my
knowledge, actually been widely implemented. You task in this
question is to discover any electronic cash systems which have
been actually implemented on commercial websites.
We aren't interested in the traditional credit-card approach,
and I don't want a report on how the different e-cash
systems operate; rather I want to know who is using these
systems right now.
- This question is about network security. Your
task is to investigate some practical aspects of public key cryptosystems.
In particular,
you should look at PGP (Phil Zimmerman's
Pretty Good Privacy package), widely available on the Internet
and installed on the department's Unix systems.
As part of your assessment, you are required to create a personal PGP
public/private key pair and then send, in a secure way, an
email message to your lecturer, such that no one except
your lecturer can read it. You must then provide
your public key to the lecturer in such a way that the lecturer is
certain of the origin of the
message. The email message should consist of a report which covers what
you did, why you did it, and a brief discussion of the current
status of PGP.
- Use
tkined
to build a network management system
for the Bendigo campus, monitoring most of the interesting pieces
of equipment in the campus network. You should submit the
.tki
file for your system, along with a brief description
of what it does, and how it does it, so that we can run it and
check its operation. Obviously this question is only
relevant to people who are taking the subject on campus, although
if you're located somewhere with an interesting network perhaps
you could set up tkined
and use it there. Or perhaps
you could use one of the other many SNMP packages available, see
below.
- The best (free) SNMP package for Unix
is
tkined
. There are many other SNMP-based network
monitoring packages in existence, particularly for Windows
systems, although there are a few for Macs as well. Discover two
(or more) such packages, install them and report on their usefulness.
- One of the hot issues in the Internet at present, particularly in
Australia, is that of censorship. Even as I write this assignment
question, the Australian parliament is debating the introduction
of new laws to "censor the Internet". One of the key points raised
by the opponents of 'net censorship is the technical difficulty of
implementing it, and the ease with which any kind of censorship could
be circumvented. Your task here is to investigate the technical
aspects of the problem of censorship. You are not to
look at the political aspects of censorship, nor the issue of so-called
"take down" notices for offensive material. I want you to simply research
the way in which the proposed legislation proposes to filter offensive
material from entering Australia, and whether it will work. Note that
reference information for this question is available on several Web
sites in Australia.
- Network programming question: write a computer program, in the language
of your choice, which will perform a HTTP/1.0
HEAD
request for
a specified Web page, to check that the page actually exists. Then modify
your program to read in a list of URLs, and check each one in turn for
existence. Finally, read an arbitrary text file, extract referenced URLs
from it (a referenced URL appears in the context of a
"<A HREF=" markup) and check their existence. This program is a basic
"link rot" detector, and is a very useful utility. If you intend answering
this question, please contact the lecturer before you begin -- there are
some issues I would like to make clear.
- Investigate SOCKS. This software is
frequently used as a circuit-level firewall, and is something that
you could come across in the Real World(tm). Tell me how it works,
how you configure it, and what it can do for you. Incidentally, it might
be easiest if you stick with SOCKS V.4 - the V.5 version is
somewhat more complicated.
- Investigate steganography, and in particular how it
relates to encryption and the Internet. This is a fun topic,
because you should discover lots of interesting software (eg, one
I occasionally use is called snow) and applications.
- As before, another topic with the explicit prior
approval of your lecturer. If you are interested in
something under this heading, you must email me (with [BITCNE] at
the start of the subject line, as usual) stating your proposal.
You should expect to write something between 1500 and 3000 words
on the topic of your choice, although this is not mandatory. You have
two options for submission of your assignment: traditional hard copy
(paper) form, or as a text/html email attachment, as in earlier
assignments. Your choice of submission format will not, in any way,
affect the mark which you obtain, although students choosing
electronic submission should consult the guidelines available on the
BITCNE home page before proceeding to submit via this method.
Submissions must, in general, adhere to the requirements of the
LaTrobe University, Bendigo Assignment Guide.
This assignment carries 20% of your mark for Computer Networks.
Due Date: End of semester 1, 1999.
Lecturer and tutor:
Phil
Scott 5444 7277,
p.scott@latrobe.edu.au
Phil
Scott