Unit-VI Network Security and

Public Key Infrastructure

6.1 Overview of Network Security
6.2 Digital Certificates and X.509 certificates, Certificate Life Cycle
Management
6.3 PKI trust models, PKIX
6.4. Email Security: Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)
6.5. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS)
6.6. IP Security (IPSec)
6.7. Firewalls and their types
 PKI

• PKI is a set of standards, procedures, software, and people for implementing

authentication using public key cryptography.
• PKI is used to request, install, configure, manage and revoke digital
certificates.
• PKI offers authentication via digital certificates, and these digital certificates
are signed and provided by certificate authorities.
Public Key Infrastructure
 Functions
➢ functions:
⚫ registration
⚫ initialization
⚫ certification
⚫ key pair recovery
⚫ key pair update
⚫ revocation request
⚫ cross certification
 X.509 Authentication Service
➢ part of CCITT X.500 directory service standards
⚫ distributed servers maintaining user info database
➢ defines framework for authentication services
⚫ directory may store public-key certificates
⚫ with public key of user signed by certification authority
➢ also defines authentication protocols
➢ uses public-key crypto & digital signatures
⚫ algorithms not standardised, but RSA recommended
➢ X.509 certificates are widely used
⚫ have 3 versions
X.509 Certificates
Certificate Life Cycle Management
 Network Security
▪IP Security,
▪Web Security,
▪Secure Socket Layer (SSL),
▪Transport Layer Security (TLS),
▪Different versions of SNMPs, PGP.
ISO/OSI model
Security at Different Layers
 Security at the Application Layer: E-Mail

• Pretty Good Privacy (PGP):

➢ PGP is a public key encryption package to protect e-mail and data files.
➢It lets you communicate securely with people you've never met, with no
secure channels needed for prior exchange of keys.
➢The actual operation of PGP is based on five services: authentication,
confidentiality, compression, e-mail compatibility, and segmentation.
• PGP provides authentication via a digital signature scheme.
• PGP provides confidentiality by encrypting messages before transmission
• PGP compresses the message after applying the signature and before encryption. The
idea is to save space.
• PGP encrypts a message together with the signature (if not sent separately) resulting
into a stream of arbitrary 8-bit octets. But since many e-mail systems permit only use of
blocks consisting of ASCII text, PGP accommodates this by converting the raw 8-bit
binary streams into streams of printable ASCII characters using a radix-64 conversion
scheme. On receipt, the block is converted back from radix-64 format to binary.
• To accommodate e-mail size restrictions, PGP automatically segments email messages
that are too long. However, the segmentation is done just before transmitting it.
 Privacy Enchanced Mail (PEM):

• The figure below shows a typical network mail service. The U (user
agent) interacts directly with the sender. When the message is
composed, the U hands it to the MT (message transport, or transfer,
agent). The MT transfers the message to its destination host, or to
another MT, which in turn transfers the message further. At the
destination host, the MT invokes a user agent to deliver the message.
• An attacker can read electronic mail at any of the computers on which MTs handling the message reside, as well as on the
network itself.
• Four types of attacks (violation of confidentiality, authentication, message integrity, and nonrepudiation) make electronic
mail nonsecure. So IETF with the goal of e-mail privacy develop electronic mail protocols that would provide the
following services.
1. Confidentiality, by making the message unreadable except to the sender and recipient(s)
2. Origin authentication, by identifying the sender precisely
3. Data integrity, by ensuring that any changes in the message are easy to detect
4. Nonrepudiation of origin (if possible)
The protocols were named Privacy-Enhanced Electronic Mail (or PEM).
 PEM vs. PGP

• Use of different ciphers: PGP uses IDEA cipher but PEM

uses DES in CBC mode.
• Use of certificate models: PGP uses general “web of trust”
but PEM uses hierarchical certification structure
 Security at the Transport Layer

• Secured Socket Layer (SSL)

• The Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a standard developed by Netscape
Corporation to provide security in WWW browsers and servers.
• The current version, SSLv3, is the basis for an Internet standard
protocol under development.
• The newer protocol, the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, is
compatible with SSLv3 and has only minor changes. It has not yet
been adopted formally.
 SSL GOALS
• Cryptography security: One of the SSL protocol’s primary goals is to establish a secure connection
between two parties. A symmetric Encryption is used after an initial handshake to define a secret key.
• Reliability: The connection is reliable. Message transport includes a message integrity check using a
keyed MAC computed using secure hash functions.
• Interoperability: Different applications should be able to successfully exchange cryptographic
parameters without knowledge of one another's code.
• Extensibility: Provide a framework that allows new public-key and bulk encryption methods to be
incorporated as necessary. This will also achieve the goal of avoiding the need to implement an entire
new security library.
• Relative efficiency: Cryptographic operations tend to be highly CPU intensive. For this reason the
SSL protocol has some options (such as caching and compression), which allow a reduction in the
number of connections that need to be established from scratch and a reduction in network activity.
 Security at the Network Layer
IPSec (Internet Protocol Security)
• IPSec is a suite of authentication and encryption protocols developed by the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and designed to address the
inherent lack of security for IP-based networks.
• It is a collection of protocols and mechanisms that provide confidentiality,
authentication, message integrity, and replay detection at the IP layer.
In the data transmission IPsec protect all messages sent along a path. If the
IPsec mechanisms reside on an intermediate host (for example, a firewall or
gateway), that host is called a security gateway.
Security at the Transport Layer
Secured Socket Layer (SSL)

• The Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a standard developed by Netscape

Corporation to provide security in WWW browsers and servers. The current
version, SSLv3, is the basis for an Internet standard protocol under
development. The newer protocol, the Transport Layer Security (TLS)
protocol, is compatible with SSLv3 and has only minor changes.
SSL ARCHITECTURE
• SSL, a set of protocols, uses TCP to provide reliable end to end service.
• SSLv3 consists of two layers (see figure ) supported by numerous
cryptographic mechanisms.
• The lower layer called SSL Record Protocol provides the basic security
services to various higher level protocols, particularly HTTP.
• There are three higher level protocols that are defined as parts of SSL namely
SSL Handshake Protocol, the Change Cipher Spec Protocol, and Alert
Protocol.
• SSL works in terms of connections and sessions between
clients and servers.
• An SSL session is an association between two peers.
• An SSL connection is the set of mechanisms used to transport
data in an SSL session. A single session may have many
connections.
 Each party keeps information related to a session with each peer. The data associated with a
session includes the following information.
1. Session identifier: An arbitrary byte sequence chosen by the server to identify an active or
resumable session state.
2. Peer certificate: X509.v3 certificate of the peer. This may be null.
3. Compression method: The algorithm used to compress data prior to encryption.
4. Cipher spec: Specifies the bulk data encryption algorithm (null, DES, etc.) and a MAC
algorithm (MD5 or SHA). It also defines attributes such as the hash_size.
5. Master secret: 48-byte secret shared between the client and server.
6. Is resumable: Defines whether the session can be used to initiate new connections.
 The SSL Handshake Protocol

• This protocol, also called the key-exchange protocol, is responsible for establishing
a secure session between two parties. The SSL handshake protocol can be divided to
several important stages:
1. Authenticate the server to the client.
2. Negotiation of common cryptographic algorithms, that both server and client
support.
3. Authenticate the client to the server (optional).
4. Using public-key encryption to exchange cryptography parameters (shared secrets).
5. Establish an encrypted SSL connection.
 The SSL Change Cipher Spec
Protocol
• It is used in the last stage of the SSL Handshake protocol to let the
parties know to move from the pending state to the current state i.e.
the parties finishes using the key-exchange algorithm and moves on to
use the encryption and MAC algorithms, which were defined in the
Handshake protocol. This message has one byte with content of ‘1’
and is encrypted and compressed under the current CipherSpec.
 The SSL Alert Protocol

• It is responsible for informing errors that occur during connection.

• There are two levels of alerts:

• a fatal alert or a warning alert.
If alert is fatal the connection is terminated immediately. Other connections
of the same session may continue, but this session ID will be marked as
invalid so that no new connections can be established on this session.
Level: Indicates a fatal or warning alert
Alert: Indicates the specific alert
 SSL Application Data Protocol

• This protocol simply passes data from the application layer to the SSL
Record Protocol layer. The record protocol transports the data to the peer
using the current compression and cipher algorithms
 Transport Layer Security(TLS)

• TLS is an IETF standardization initiative whose goal is to produce an Internet standard

version of SSL.
• There are two differences between the SSLv3 and TLS MAC schemes: the actual
algorithm and the scope of the MAC calculation. TLS makes use of the HMAC
algorithm defined as
HMACK(M) = H[(K+ XOR opad)||H[(K+ XOR ipad)||M]]

• SSLv3 uses the same algorithm, except that the padding bytes are concatenated with the
secret key rather than being XORed with the secret key padded to the block length.

• The level of security should be about the same in both cases.

 Firewalls

• Firewall is hardware device or software applications that act as filters between a

company’s private network and the internet. It protects networked computers from
intentional hostile intrusion that could compromise confidentiality or result in data
corruption or denial of service by enforcing an access control policy between two
networks.
• The main purpose of a firewall system is to control access to or from a protected
network (i.e., a site). It implements a network access policy by forcing connections to
pass through the firewall, where they can be examined and evaluated. A firewall system
can be a router, a personal computer, a host, or a collection of hosts, set up specifically
to shield a site or subnet from protocols and services that can be abused from hosts
outside the subnet.
• The main function of a firewall is to centralize access control. A firewall serves
as the gatekeeper between the untrusted Internet and the more trusted internal
networks. The earliest firewalls were simply routers.
• Firewalls provide several types of protection:
- They can block unwanted traffic.
- They can direct incoming traffic to more trustworthy internal systems. They
hide vulnerable systems, which can’t easily be secured from the Internet.
- They can log traffic to and from the private network.
- They can hide information like system names, network topology, network
device types, and internal user ID’s from the Internet.
Types of firewalls yourself