BITCNE Computer Networks - Assignment 3, 2000

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.