SECURITY PRACTICE AND SYSTEM

SECURITY
Prepared By:
Dr. Somya Dubey
 Electronic Mail security
◦ PGP, S/MIME
 IP security
 Web Security
 SYSTEMSECURITY:
◦ Intruders
◦ Malicious software
◦ viruses
◦ Firewalls.
 After web browsing, e-mail is the most widely used network-
reliant application.
 Mail servers, after web servers, are the most often attacked
Internet hosts.
 Basic e-mail offers little security, counter to public perception.
 Good technical solutions are available, but not widely used.
◦ If we understand why this is so, we might understand
something about why security is ‘hard’.
 RFC 822 defines a format for text email messages.
 An email message is considered to be made up of two portions:
 Its contents (or body) and headers.
 This is very similar to the way our manual postal system works.
 There also, we have letters (similar to email contents) and envelopes (similar
to email headers).
 Therefore, an email message consists of a number of header lines followed by
the actual message contents.
 A header line usually consists of a keyword, followed by a colon, followed
by the keyword’s arguments.
 Loss of confidentiality.
◦ E-mails are sent in clear over open networks.
◦ E-mails stored on potentially insecure clients and
mail servers.
 Loss of integrity.
◦ No integrity protection on e-mails; anybody be
altered in transit or on mail server.
 Lack of data origin authentication.
◦ Is this e-mail really from the person named in the From:field?
 Lack of non-repudiation.
◦ Can I rely and act on the content? (integrity)
◦ If so, can the sender later deny having sent it? Who is liable if I
have acted?
 Lack of notification of receipt.
◦ Has the intended recipient received my e-mail and acted on it?
◦ A message locally marked as ‘sent’ may not have been
delivered.
 What are the Options?
◦ Secure the server to client connections (easy thing first)
 https access to webmail
 Protection against insecure wireless access
◦ Secure the end-to-end email delivery
 The PGPs of the world
 Practical in an enterprise intra-network environment
 PGP provides a confidentiality and authentication service that can be used
for electronic mail and file storage applications.
 With the explosively growing reliance on electronic mail for every
conceivable purpose, there grows a demand for authentication and
confidentiality services.
 Phil Zimmerman is the father of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) protocol.
 The best available crypto algorithms to use & integrated them into a single
program
 PGP provides a confidentiality and authentication service that can be used
for electronic mail and file storage applications.
 It is independent of government organizations and runs on a wide range of
systems, in both free & commercial versions.
 PGP is an e-mail security program written by Phil
Zimmermann, based on the IDEA algorithm for
encryption of plaintext and uses the RSA Public Key
algorithm for encryption of the private key.
 PGP incorporates tools for developing a public-key
trust model and public-key certificate management.
 PGP is an open-source freely available
software package for e-mail security. It
provides authentication; confidentiality;
compression; e-mail compatibility; and
segmentation and reassembly.
 In PGP, it consists of the creation of a message digest
of the email message using the SHA-1 algorithm.
 The resulting message digest is then encrypted with the
sender’s private key. The result is the sender’s digital
signature.
 Here, the input message as well as the digital signature are
compressed together to reduce the size of the final message
that will be transmitted.
 For this, the famous ZIP program is used. ZIP is based on
the Lempel–Ziv algorithm.
 The Lempel–Ziv algorithm looks for repeated strings or
words, and stores them in variables. It then replaces the
actual occurrence of the repeated word or string with a
pointer to the corresponding variable.
 Since a pointer requires only a few bits of memory as
compared to the original string, this method results in the
data being compressed.
 In this step, the compressed output of step 2 (i.e. the
compressed form of the original email and the digital
signature together) are encrypted with a symmetric key.
 For this, generally the IDEA algorithm in CFB mode is
used.
 In this case, the symmetric key used for encryption in
step 3 is now encrypted with the receiver’s public key.
 The output of step 3 and step 4 together form a digital
envelope.
 The Base-64 encoding (also called Radix-64 encoding or ASCII armour)
process transforms arbitrary binary input into printable character output.
 In this technique, the binary input is processed in blocks of 3 octets, or 24
bits.
 These 24 bits are considered to be made up of 4 sets, each of 6 bits.
 Each such set of 6 bits is mapped into an 8-bit output character in this
process.
 Every PGP user needs to have two sets of key rings:
(a) A ring of her own public-private key pairs, and
(b) A ring of the public keys of other users.
 Signing the message
 a. PGP retrieves the sender's private key from the private-key ring
using your_userid as an index. If your_userid was not provided in
the command, the first private key on the ring is retrieved.
 b. PGP prompts the user for the passphrase to recover the
unencrypted private key.
 c. The signature component of the message is constructed
 Encrypting the message
 a. PGP generates a session key and encrypts the message.
 b. PGP retrieves the recipient's public key from the public-key ring
using her_userid as an index.
 c. The session key component of the message is constructed.
 Decrypting the message
 a. PGP retrieves the receiver's private key from the private-key
ring, using the Key ID field in the session key component of the
message as an index.
 b. PGP prompts the user for the passphrase to recover the
unencrypted private key.
 c. PGP then recovers the session key and decrypts the message.
 Authenticating the message
 a. PGP retrieves the sender's public key from the public-key ring,
using the Key ID field in the signature key component of the
message as an index.
 b. PGP recovers the transmitted message digest.
 c. PGP computes the message digest for the received message
and compares it to the transmitted message digest to authenticate.
 (a) Introducer Trust: The introducer trust then specifies what
level of trust the introducer wants to allocate to other users in
the system. These levels are none, partial, and complete.
 (b) Certificate Trust:When a user A receives a certificate of
another user B issued by a third user C, depending on the level
of trust that A has in C, A assigns a certificate trust level to that
certificate while storing it.
 (c) Key Legitimacy: The objectives behind introducer trust
and certificate trust is to decide whether to trust the public key
of a user. In PGP terms, this is called key legitimacy.
 PGP defines the following simple rule to decide the key
legitimacy:
 The level of key legitimacy for a user is the weighted
trust level for that user.
 For instance, suppose we have assigned certain weights
to certificate trust levels.
 Regardless of the mechanism, eventually the process of
obtaining keys of other users and sending our
own to others creates what is called a web of trust between
groups of people.
 This keeps the public key ring getting bigger and bigger,
and helps secure the email communication.
 Whenever a user needs to revoke his/her public key
(because of loss of private key, etc), he/she needs
to send a key revocation certificate to the other users.
 This certificate is self-signed by the user with
his/her private key