Security mechanisms

Security mechanisms provide your applications and system with integrity, confidentiality and authentication.

The following lists the possible choices for security mechanisms:

Username Authentication with Symmetric Keys

The username authentication with symmetric keys protects your application for integrity and confidentiality. In this process the user, instead of possesing a certain key or creificate enters his username and password for authentication. The client shares a secret key with the server.

Transport Layer Security (TLS)

The transport security is a security mechanism that makes use of cryptography to prevent eavesdropping, forgery and tampering. This mechanism makes sure that the server side is authenticated, which gives the user certainty to whom he may be communicating.

Mutual Certificates Security

The mutual certificates security is a bit similar to the transport layer security, but instead of authenticating the server side alone, this mechanism authenticates both the server side and the end user.

Security services

The following are services that you can use to secure your computer:

Anti virus software

An anti virus software is a computer program that searches for malicious or possible threats that may or may have already infected the computer. It neutralizes and eliminates such threats. Anti virus softwares nowadays, can combat threats more than just viruses but threats such as worms, phishing attacks, rootkits, trojan horses and other malware.

Kerberos

Kerberos is an authentication protocol that is mostly used in client/server applications, that makes use of secret-key cryptography, to make sure that the transaction from computer A to computer B or through a series of networks are secured.

Firewall

A firewall is a software program that can deny, permit or block a certain kind of computer traffic. It also regulates the traffic flow through the networks.

Security attacks

Security has been one of the top priorities for most people, in this day and age where computer attacks are frequently evolving. Computer security, nowadays has become complex and very confusing to many people. That is why we are going to share our knowledge in the different kinds of security attacks.


When we hear of the term security attacks the most common thought that will come out of our mind will be "hacking" or the "hackers". But in truth security attacks have many different forms.Here are the list of the different types of security attacks:

Virus, Worms and Trojan Horse

Computer viruses are computer programs that are capable of infecting a computer without its permission or without the knowledge of the user, leaving infections as it travels. A virus can be triggered or spread by the user because most of the viruses are attached to a executable file.

worms on the other hand are a sub class of a virus that, unlike a computer virus, can spread into your system without the need to be triggered by the user.

Trojan horse is a much vague kinf of virus that can make the user actually think that it is a safe software that appears useful but actually causes damage to the computer once installed.But unlike viruses and worms a trojan horse does not replicate itself.

When a host is uninfected the virus can easily spread by means of a removable medium, such as floppy disk, cd-roms, USB drives, or a user can easily send the said virus to another computer through the internet or through the network.

Denial-of-service attack(DoS)

Dos is a type of attack that can cause a computer resource to become unavailable to users. This type of attack usually are done by a person that causes traffic to a the system that will render it incapable of responding to the requests.

Logic Bomb

Logic bomb is also called a slag code, it is similar to a virus or a worm, but are dormant until an event occurs triggering its effect.

Hacker attacks

These are attacks that aren't caused by a certain software or virus, instead it makes use of the weak spot in the system.Here are the different hacker attacks:

Ip spoofing - the attacker fakes its own IP address to make the user think it was coming from a different source.

Man in the middle attack - makes use of open session to attack the user using IP spoofing, meaning computer a will think that computer b is still the one in communication, while in truth another party has already stolen the said session.

DNS poisoning - the attacker creates a false DNS information to be sent, that can cause traffic to be diverted. When the DNS information is sent the attacker can continue to reply using additional false information which the requesting DNS server may cache. Once the user attempts to log on to the said false DNS, all the user information can be retrieved by the false DNS or the attacker itself.

Password cracking - the attacker retrieves a password to gain unauthorized access.