La Trobe University, Bendigo
Division of Information Technology
BITCNE: Computer Networks
Assignment 3 2000
New questions may appear on this assignment sheet
Answer ONE ONLY of the following questions.
- DDOS question -- investigate the recent DDOS attacks on commercial
Websites, describe how they were carried out, and discuss possible
defences against such attacks.
- 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 one
(or more) such packages, install them and report on their usefulness.
- 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.
You should expect to write something between 1500 and 3000 words on the
topic of your choice, although this is not mandatory. You can
submit your assignment using either traditional hard copy (paper)
form, or as an email attachment
of MIME type text/html
sent to
cnsubmit@ironbark.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au
, as for the
first assignment. Your choice of submission format will not affect
the mark gained for your assignment.
Submissions must, as usual, adhere to the requirements of the La Trobe
University, Bendigo Assignment Guide.
This assignment carries 20% of your mark for Computer Networks.
Due Date:End of semester 1, 2000
Lecturer: Phil Scott, 5444 7277,
p.scott@latrobe.edu.au.
Copyright © 2000 by
Phil Scott,
La Trobe University.