UNIT - I

Security means precautions taken against spying.

Security is like statistics: “What it reveals is trivial, what it conceals is vital”. In other words, the right security
infrastructure opens up just enough doors that are mandatory. It protects every thing else.

Security Approaches:

An organization can take several approaches to implement its security model. Let us summarize these
approaches.

No Security: in the simplest case, the approach could be a decision to implement no security at all.

Security through Obscurity: In this model, a system is secure simple because nobody knows about its
existence and contents. This approach can’t work for long, and there are many ways an attacker can come to
know about it.

Host Security: In this scheme, the security for each host is enforced individually. This is a very safe approach,
but the trouble is that it cannot scale well. The complexity and diversity modern sites/ organization makes the
task even harder.

Network security: Host security is tough to achieve as organizations grow and become more diverse. In this
technique, the focus is to control network access to various hosts and their services, rather than individual host
security. This is very efficient and scalable model.

Security management Practices:

Good security management practices always talk of security policy. A good security policy and its proper
implementation go a long way in ensuring adequate security management practices. A good security policy
generally takes care of four key aspects, as follows.

● Affordability: how much money and efforts does this security implementation cost?

● Functionality: What is the mechanism of providing security?

● Cultural issues: does the policy get well with the people’s expectations, working style and beliefs?

● Legality: Does the policy meet the legal requirements?

Once a security policy is in place, the following points should be ensured.

● Explanation of the policy to all concerned

● Outline everybody’s responsibilities

● Use simple language in all communications

● Accountability should be established

● Provide for expectations and periodic views.

To assess the security needs of an organization effectively and to evaluate and choose various security
products and policies, the manager responsible for security needs some systematic way of defining the
requirements for security and …

One approach is to consider three aspects of information security:

Security service: A service that enhances the security of the data processing systems and the information
transfers of an organization.

Security Attack: Any action that compromises the security of information owned by an organization.

Security Mechanism: A mechanism that is designed to detect, prevent or recover from a security attack.

The OSI(Open Systems Interconnection) security architecture provides a systematic framework for
defining security services, attacks and mechanisms. The OSI security architecture is useful to managers as
a way of organizing the task of providing security.

Security Services / Principles of Security:

“ A processing or communication services that enhances the security of the data processing systems and
the information transfers of an organization”. The services are intended to counter security attacks, and
they make us of one or more security mechanisms to provide the service.
Security services include
- Confidentiality
- Authentication
- Integrity
- Non repudiation
- Access Control
- Availability

We shall take an example to understand these concepts.

Let us assume that a person A wants to send a check worth Rs. 1000/- to another person B.
Normally, A will write check for Rs. 1000/- put it inside an envelope and send it to B.

- A will like to ensure that no one except B gets the envelope, and even if someone else
gets it, she does not come to know about the details of the check. This is the principle of
“Confidentiality”.
- A and B will further like to make sure that no one tamper with the contents of the check(
such as its amount, data signature, name of the payee etc). This is the principle of
“Integrity”.
- B would like to be assured that the check has indeed came from A, not from someone
else posing as A. This is the principle of “Authentication”.
- What will happen tomorrow if B deposit the check in his account, the money transferred
from A’s account to B’s account, and then A refuses having written/sent the check? The
 court of law will use A’s signature to disallow A to refute this and settle this dispute.
This is the principle if “non-repudiation”.

There are the four chief principles of security. There are tow more, “access control” and “availability”
which are not related to a particular message, but are linked to the overall system as a whole.

Confidentiality:

The principle of confidentiality specifies that only the sender and the intended recipient (s) should be
able to access the contents of a message.
Confidentiality gets compromised if an unauthorized person is able to access the message.

Eg:

A Message B

This type of attack is called “Interception”.

Authentication:

Authentication establish proof of identities. The authentication process ensures that the origin of
electronic message or document is correctly identified.
For example, suppose that user C sends an electronic document over the internet to user B. However,
the trouble is that user C had posed as user A. When she sent this document to user B, how would user b know
that the message has come from user C who is posing as A?

A I am user A B

C
This type of attack is called “Fabrication”.

The function of authentication service is to assure the recipient that the message is from the source that
it claims to be from. Two specific authentication services are,
- Peer Entity Authentication : Provides for the confirmation of the identity of a peer entity in an association.
It is provided for use at the establishment of, or at times during the data transfer phase, of a connection. It
attempts to provide confidence that an entity is not performing either masquerade or an unauthorized replay
of a previous connection.
- Data Origin Authentication: Provides for the confirmation of the source of a data unit. It does not provide
protection against the duplication or modification of data units. This type of service supports applications like
electronic mail where there is no prior interaction between communicating entities.

Integrity:

When the content of a message are changed after the sender sends it, but before it reaches the intended
recipient, we say that the integrity of the message is lost.

Ideal route of the message

A B

This type of attack is called “Modification”.

Non Repudiation:

There are situations where a user sends a message, and later on refuses that he had sent that message.
“The principle of non-repudiation defeats such possibilities of denying something, having done it”.
“Non-repudiation does not allow the sender of a message to refute the claim of not sending that
message”. Thus, when a message is sent, the receiver can prove that the message was in fact sent by the alleged
sender.

Access Control:

Access control is the ability to limit and control the access to host system and applications via
communication links. The principle of access control specifies and controls who can access what. For
instance, we should be able to specify that user X can view the records in a database, but can’t update them.
However, user Y can update them. Access control mechanism can be set up to ensure this. Access control is
broadly related to two areas: role management and rule management.

Availability:
 An availability service is one that protects a system to ensure its availability i.e. availability states that
resources should be available to authorized entities at all times. This service addresses the security concerns
raised by denial-of-service / Interruption attacks.

Security Attacks:
Security attacks can be classified into two types. They are passive attacks and active attacks as shown below.

Security Attacks

Passive Attacks Active attacks

Release of message Traffic Denial of

Masquerade Fabrication Modificatio
contents Analysis Service
content n

Replay Modifying message

Passive Attacks:

Passive attacks are in the nature of eavesdropping on, or monitoring of data transmissions, i.e. the attacker
aims to obtain information that is in transit. The term passive indicates that the attacker does not attempt to
perform any modification to the data. This is why passive attacks are harder to detect. Therefore the general
approach to deal with passive attacks is to think about prevention, rather than detection or corrective actions.
Two types of passive attacks are release of message content and traffic analysis.

Release of message content: A telephone conversation, an electronic mail message, and a transferred file may
contain sensitive or confidential information. We would like to prevent the opponent from learning the contens
of these transmissions. But, if the contens of the message released against our wish to someone else then, it is
called as release of message content attack. We can prevent this attack using certain security mechanisms like
encoding.

Traffic Analysis: If many endoded messages are passing through, the opponent might be able to observe the
pattern of those messages. The opponent could determine the location and identity of communicating hosts and
could observe the frequency and length of messages being exchanges. Such atmepts of analyzing messages is
known as traffic analysis attack.

Active Attacks:

These attacks involve some modification of the data stream or the creation of a false stream. These attacks can
be classified in to four categories:

● Fabrication: An unauthorized party inserts counterfeit objects into the system. This is an attack on
authenticity.

Examples: insertion of spurious message in a network or addition of records to a file.

● Masquerade –One entity pretends to be a different entity.

 ● Replay –involves passive capture of a data unit and its subsequent transmission to produce an
unauthorized effect.

● Modification of messages –Some portion of message is altered or the messages are delayed or
recorded, to produce an unauthorized effect.

Denial of service –Prevents or inhibits the normal use or management of communication facilities. Another
form of service denial is the disruption of an entire network, either by disabling the network or overloading it
with messages so as to degrade performance.

It is quite difficult to prevent active attacks absolutely, because to do so would require physical protection of
all communication facilities and paths at all times. Instead, the goal is to detect them and to recover from any
disruption or delays caused by them.

A Model for network security

A model for much of what we will be discussing is captured, in very general terms. A message is to be
transferred from one party to another across some sort of Internet service. The two parties, who are the
principals in this transaction, must cooperate for the exchange to take place. A logical information channel is
established by defining a route through the Internet from source to destination cooperative use of
communication protocols (e.g., TCP/IP) by the two principals.
Security aspects come into play when it is necessary or desirable to protect the information transmission from
an opponent who may present a threat to confidentiality, authenticity .
All the techniques for providing security have two components:

• A security-related transformation on the information to be sent. Examples include the encryption of the
message, which scrambles the message so that it is unreadable by the opponent, and the addition of a code
based on the contents of the message, which can be used to verify the identity of the sender.

• Some secret information shared by the two principals and, it is hoped, unknown to the opponent. An example
is an encryption key used in conjunction with the transformation to scramble the message before transmission
and unscramble it on reception
● A trusted third party may be needed to achieve secure transmission. For example, a third party may be
responsible for distributing the secret information to the two principals while keeping it from any
opponent This general model shows that there are four basic tasks in designing a particular security
service:
1. Design an algorithm for performing the security-related transformation. The algorithm should be such
that an opponent cannot defeat its purpose.
2. Generate the secret information to be used with the algorithm.
3. Develop methods for the distribution and sharing of the secret information.
4. Specify a protocol to be used by the two principals that makes use of the security algorithm and the
secret information to achieve a particular security service.

The hacker can be someone who, with no malign intent, simply gets satisfaction from breaking and entering a
computer system. The intruder can be a disgruntled employee who wishes to do damage or a criminal who
seeks to exploit computer assets for financial gain
(e.g., obtaining credit card numbers or performing illegal money transfers).

Substitution Techniques:
Substitution technique is a classical encryption approach where the characters present in the initial message
are restored by the other characters or numbers or by symbols. If the plain text (original message) is treated as
the string of bits, thus the substitution technique would restore bit pattern of plain text with the bit pattern of
cipher text.
There are various types of substitution ciphers which are as follows −

● Caesar Cipher − In this substitution technique, it can encrypt the plain text, each alphabet of the
plain text is restored by the alphabet three places further it and it can decrypt the cipher text each
alphabet of cipher text is restored by the alphabet three places before it.

● Modified Caesar Cipher: In Modified Caesar Cipher the original plain text alphabets may not
necessarily be three places down the line, but instead can be any places down the line.
Example : Alphabet A in the plain text would not necessarily be replaced by D. It can be replaced by
any valid alphabet i.e by E or F or by G and so on. Once the replacement scheme is decided, it would
be constant and will be used for all the other alphabets in that message.

● Monoalphabetic Cipher − In monoalphabetic substitution cipher, a character in a plaintext is

always restored or changed to the similar character in the ciphertext indifferent of its position in
the text.
For instance, if a letter A in the plaintext is changed to G then each appearance of A in the
plaintext will be restored by G.
Plaintext : hello
Ciphertext : IFMMP
This is a monoalphabetic cipher as both 1’s are encrypted as ‘M’.
● Polyalphabetic cipher − In polyalphabetic substitution, each appearance of a character in the
plaintext can have a different substitution character in the ciphertext.
The relationship among a character in plaintext and a character in ciphertext is one to many. For
instance, letter ‘A’ can be restored by the letter ‘C’ and the similar letter ‘A’ can be restored by
‘N’ later in the ciphertext.
In polyalphabetic cipher, frequencies of plaintext letter are not reflected in the ciphertext.
Therefore, breaking of polyalphabetic cipher is complex than monoalphabetic cipher as
statistical analysis cannot be used on it.
The main feature of polyalphabetic substitution cipher are the following −
o It is needed a set of associated monoalphabetic substitution rules.
o It need a key that decides which rule is used for which transformation.
● Polygram Substitution Cipher:
In Polygram substitution cipher, instead of replacing one plain-text alphabet we simply replace a block
of the word with another block of a word. Example, 'INCLUDEHELP' will change to
'WDSAEQTGTAI' whereas 'HELP' will replace to 'RYCV'. This is true that the last four letters are the
same but still different in both words.
 Playfair Cipher
The best known multiple letter encryption cipher is the playfair, which treats digrams (2
letters) in the plaintext as single units and translates these units into cipher text digrams (2
letters).
The playfair algorithm is based on the use of 5x5 matrix of letters constructed using a keyword.

The letter „I‟ and „J‟ count as one letter. Plaintext is encrypted two letters at a time according
to the following rules:
 Repeating plaintext letters that would fall in the same pair are separated with a filler
letter such as “x‟.
 Plaintext letters that fall in the same row of the matrix are each replaced by the letter to
the right, with the first element of the row following the last.
 Plaintext letters that fall in the same column are replaced by the letter beneath, with
the top element of the column following the last.
 Otherwise, each plaintext letter is replaced by the letter that lies in its own row and
the column occupied by the other plaintext letter.
 Plaintext = meet me at the school house
Splitting two letters as a unit = me et me at th es ch o x ol ho us ex Corresponding
cipher text = CL KL CL RS PD IL HY AV MP HF XL IU

Strength of playfair cipher

Playfair cipher is a great advance over simple mono alphabetic ciphers.
Since there are 26 letters, 26x26 = 676 diagrams are possible, so identification
of individual diagram is more difficult.

Vigenere Cipher
This scheme of cipher uses a text string (say, a word) as a key, which is
then used for doing a number of shifts on the plaintext.

The plain text she is listening is encrypted using word “PASCAL”. The
initial stream is (15, 00, 18, 02, 00, 11). The key stream is the replication
of this initial key stream (as many times as needed).

Security Value
Vigenere Cipher was designed by tweaking the standard Caesar cipher
to reduce the effectiveness of cryptanalysis on the ciphertext and make
a cryptosystem more robust. It is significantly more secure than a
regular Caesar Cipher.

Transposition Techniques are based on the permutation of the plain-text instead of

substitution. Transposition Cipher is a cryptographic algorithm where the order of alphabets
in the plaintext is rearranged to form a cipher text.
1) Rail-Fence Technique
This technique is a type of Transposition technique and does is write the plain text as a
sequence of diagonals and changing the order according to each row.
It uses a simple algorithm,

1. Writing down the plaintext message into a sequence of diagonals.

2. Row-wise writing the plain-text written from above step.
Example,
Let’s say, we take an example of “INCLUDEHELP IS AWESOME”.

So the Cipher-text are, ICUEEPSWSMNLDHLIAEOW.

First, we write the message in a zigzag manner then read it out direct row-wise to change it to
cipher-text.
Now as we can see, Rail-Fence Technique is very to break by any cryptanalyst.
2) Columnar Transition Technique
A. Basic Technique
It is a slight variation to the Rail-fence technique, let’s see its algorithm:

1. In a rectangle of pre-defined size, write the plain-text message row by row.

2. Read the plain message in random order in a column-wise fashion. It can be any order
such as 2, 1, 3 etc.
3. Thus Cipher-text is obtained.

Let’s see an example:

Original message: "INCLUDEHELP IS AWESOME".
Now we apply the above algorithm and create the rectangle of 4 columns (we decide to make
a rectangle with four column it can be any number.)

Now let’s decide on an order for the column as 4, 1, 3 and 2 and now we will read the text in
column-wise.
Cipher-text: LHIEEIUESSCEPWMNDLAO
B. Columnar Technique with multiple rounds
In this method, we again change the chipper text we received from a Basic technique that is
in round 1 and again follows the same procedure for the cipher-text from round 1.
Algorithm:

1. In a rectangle of pre-defined size, write the plain-text message row by row.

2. Read the plain message in random order in a column-wise fashion. It can be any order
such as 2, 1, 3 etc.
3. Thus, Cipher-text of round 1 is obtained.
4. Repeat from step 1 to 3.
Example:
Original message: "INCLUDEHELP IS AWESOME".
Now we apply the above algorithm and create the rectangle of 4 column (we decide to make
a rectangle with four column it can be any number.)

Now let’s decide on an order for the column as 4, 1, 3 and 2 and now we will read the text in
column-wise.
Cipher-text of round 1: LHIEEIUESSCEPWMNDLAO
Round 2:

Now, we decide to go with a previous order that is 4,1,3,2.

Cipher-text: EEENLESPICUMHISW
These multi-round columnar techniques are harder to crack as compared to methods seen
earlier.