Unit-III - E-Commerce and Its Application

E-Commerce and its Application
Unit-III
Network Security/Firewall
Network Security/ Firewall
1. Client Server Security

2. Firewalls and network Security
3. Data and message security
4. Encrypted documents and electronic
mail.
Introduction of Network Security/Firewalls
 In most common problem in network is Security, privacy,
authentication and anonymity.
 A security threat is defined as a circumstance, condition,
or event with the potential to cause economic hardship to
data or network resources in the form of destruction,
disclosure, modification of data, denial of service, and/or
fraud, waste, and abuse.
 The discussion of security concerns in electronic
commerce can be divided into two broad types.
 Client –Server security
 Data and transaction security
Introduction of Network Security/Firewalls
 Client –Server security uses various authorization
methods to make sure that only valid users and programs
have access to information resources such as databases.
 Access control mechanisms must be set up to ensure that
properly authenticated users are allowed access only to
those resources that they are entitled to use.
 Such mechanisms include password protection, encrypted
smart cards, biometrics, and firewalls.
 Data and transaction security ensures the privacy and
confidentiality in electronic messages and data packets,
including the authentication of remote users in network
transactions for activities such as on-line payments.
 Such mechanisms include data encryption using various
cryptographic methods.
1. Client Server Security

1. Trust-based security
2. Security Through Obscurity
3. Password Schemes
4. Biometric Systems
Client-Server Network Security
 Client-server network security is one of the biggest
headaches system administrators face as they balance the
opposing goals of user maneuverability and easy access
and site security and confidentiality of local information.
 Network security on the Internet is a major concern for
commercial organizations, especially top management.
 Recently the internet has raised many new security
concerns. By connecting to the Internet, a local network
organization may be exposing itself to the entire
population on the Internet.
 The figure illustrates, an Internet connection effectively
breaches the physical security perimeter of the corporate
network and opens itself to access from other networks
comprising the public Internet.
 For many commercial operations, security will simply be
a matter of making sure that existing system features,
such as passwords and privileges.
 Hackers can use password guessing, password trapping,
security holes in programs, or common network access
procedures to impersonate users and thus pose a threat to
the server.
 Client server network security problems manifest
themselves in three ways.
 Physical security holes
 Software security holes
 Inconsistent usage hoels.
 For many commercial operations, security will simply be
a matter of making sure that existing system features,
such as passwords and privileges.
 Hackers can use password guessing, password trapping,
security holes in programs, or common network access
procedures to impersonate users and thus pose a threat to
the server.
 Client server network security problems manifest
themselves in three ways.
 Physical security holes
 Software security holes
 Inconsistent usage holes.
 Physical security holes result when individuals gain
unauthorized physical access to a computer. A good example
would be a public workstation room, where it would be easy for
a wandering hacker to reboot a machine into single user mode
and tamper with the files, if precautions are not taken.
 On the network, this is also a common problem, as hackers gain
access to network systems by guessing passwords of various users.
 Software security holes result when badly written program or
“privileged” software are “compromised” into doing things they
shouldn’t.
 The most famous example of this category is the “sendmail” hole,
which brought the Internet to its knees in 1988.
 A more recent problem was the “rlogin” hole in the IBM Rs-6000
workstations, which enabled a cracker to create a “root” shell or
supersuer access mode.
 This is the highest level of access possible and could be
used to delete the entire file system, or create a new account
or password file resulting in incalculable damage.
 Inconsistent usage hole result when a system
administrator assembles a combination of hardware and
software such that the system is seriously flawed from a
security point of view.
 The incompatibility of attempting two unconnected but
useful things creates the security hole. Problems like this are
difficult to isolate once a system is set up and running, so it
is better to carefully build the system with them in mind
 This type of problem is becoming common as software
becomes more complex.
 To reduce these security threats, various protection
methods are used.
 At the file level, operating systems typically offer
mechanisms such as access control lists that specify the
resources various users and groups are entitled to access.
 Protection- also called authorization or access control-
grants privileges to the system or resource by checking
user-specific information such as passwords.
 The problem in the case of e-commerce is very simple: if
consumers connect a computer to the Internet, they can
easily log into it from anywhere that the network reaches.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that without
proper access control, anyone else can too.
 Trust-based Security
 It means to trust everyone and do nothing extra for
protection.
 It is possible not to provide access restrictions of any
kind and to assume that all users are trustworthy and
component in their use of the shared network.
 This approach worked in the past, today this is no
longer the case.
 Security Through Obscurity (STO)
 Any network can be secure as long as nobody outside its
management group is allowed to find out anything about
its operational details and users are provided information
on a need-to-know basis.
 Hiding account passwords in binary files or scripts with
the presumption that “nobody will ever find them” is a
prime case of STO. (Somewhat like hiding the house key
under the doormat and telling only family and friends)
 In short, STO provides a false sense of security in
computing systems by hiding information.
 This method was quite successful with stand-alone
systems that run operating systems such as IBM MVS or
CMS and DEC VAX.
 Password Scheme.
 One Straightforward security solution, a password scheme.
 Password Schemes do little about deliberate attack, especially
when common words or proper names are selected as
passwords.
 This simplest method used by most hackers is dictionary
comparison-comparing a list of encrypted user passwords
against a dictionary of encrypted common words.
 This scheme often works because users tend to choose
relatively simple or familiar words as passwords.
 To beat the dictionary comparison method, experts often
recommended using a minimum of eight-characters length
mixed-case passwords containing at least one non-
alphanumeric character and changing passwords every 60 to
90 days.
 Password Scheme.
 Even so, because passwords in a remote log-in session
usually pass over the network in unencrypted form, any
eavesdropper on the network means can simply record the
password any time it is used.
 Having distinct passwords for distinct devices is sometimes
a problem, because people will write them down, share them
or include them in automatic scripts.
 To counter these threats, various approaches have been
suggested for creating one-time passwords, including smart
cards, randomized tokens, and challenge-response schemes.
 Some devices generate a visually displayed token that can be
entered as a one-time password, and other provide direct
electronic input. These devices typically symmetric
algorithm and asymmetric algorithm.
 Biometric System.
 Biometric system, the most secure level of authorization,
involve some unique aspect of a person’s body.
 Past biometric authentification was based on comparisons
of fingerprints, palm prints, retinal patterns, or on
signature verification or voice recognition.
 Biometric systems are very expensive to implement:
many biometric devices also carry a high price in terms
of inconvenience; for example, some systems take 10 to
30 seconds to verify an access request.
 Moreover users see such systems as unduly intrusive;
people are reluctant to stick a finger or a hand into a slot,
or sign their name, or sit still while an optical systems
scans their eyeball.
2. Firewalls and Network Security

1. Firewall in Practice
2. IP packet Screening Routers
3. Proxy Application Gateways
4. Hardened Firewall Hosts
5. Security Policies and Firewall
Management.
Firewalls and Network Security
 The most commonly accepted network protection is a
barrier-a firewall-between the corporate network and
the outside world (un trusted network).
 The term firewall can mean many things to many
people, but basically it is a method of placing a
device-a computer or a router-between the network
and the Internet to control and monitor all traffic
between the outside world and the local network.
 Typically, the device allows insiders to have full
access to services on the outside while granting
access from the outside only selectively, based on
long-on name, password, IP address or other
identifiers. (see the figure).
 Firewall is a protection device to shield vulnerable
areas from some form of danger.
 In the context of Internet, a firewall is a system-a
router, a personal computer, a host, or a collections of
hosts-set up specifically to shield a site or subnet
from protocols and services that can be abused from
hosts on the outside of the subnet.
 A firewall system is usually located at a gateway
point, such as site’s connection to the Internet, but
can be located at internal gateways to provide
protection for smaller collection of hosts or subnets.
 Firewalls come in several types and offer various levels of
security.
 Generally, firewalls operate by screening packets and/or
the applications that pass through them, provide
controllable filtering of network traffic, allow restricted
access to certain applications, and block access to
everything else.
 The firewall can be thought of as a pair of mechanisms
 One to block incoming traffic and
 To permit outgoing traffic.
 The general reasoning behind firewall usage is that, without a
firewall, network security is a function of each host on the
network and all hosts must cooperate to achieve a uniformly
high level of security.
Firewalls and Network security
 Firewalls in Practice.
 Firewalls ranger from simple traffic logging systems that
record all network traffic flowing through the firewall in
a file or database for auditing purpose to more complex
methods such as IP packet screening routers, hardened
firewall hosts, and proxy application gateways.
 The simplest firewall is a packet filtering gateway or
screening router. Configured with filters to restrict
packet traffic to designated addresses, screening routers
also limit the type of services that can pass through them.
 More complex and secure are application gateways.They
are essentially PCs or UNIX boxes that sit between the
Internet and a company's internal network to provide
proxy services to users on either side.
 Firewalls in Practice.
 For example, a user who want to FTP in or out through
the gateway would connect to FTP software running on
firewall, which then connects to machines on the other
side of gateway.
 Screening routers and application gateway firewalls are
frequently used in combination when security concerns
are very high.
 In case of heavy traffic, sub networks or hardened
firewall machines are set up between the Internet and a
company’s private network.
 IP Packet Screening Routers.
 This is a static traffic routing services placed between
the network service provider’s router and the internal
network.
 The traffic routing service may be implemented at an IP
level screening rules in a router or at an application
level via proxy gateways and services.
 The figure shows a secure firewall with an IP packet
Screening router.
 The firewall router filters incoming packets to permit or
deny IP packets based on several screening rules.
 These screening rules, implemented into the router are
automatically performed.
 Rules include target interface to which the packet is
routed know source IP address, and incoming packet
protocol (TCP, UDP, ICMP).
 ICMP stands for Internet Control Message Protocal
 TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol
 UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol.
 Configured routers can plug many security holes, they
do have several disadvantages.
 First screening rules are difficult to specify, given the
vastly diverse needs of users.
 Second, screening routers are fairly inflexible and do
not easily extend to deal with functionality different
from that preprogrammed by the vendor.
 Lastly, if the screening router is circumvented by a
hacker, the rest of the network is open to attack.
 Proxy Application Gateways
 It is a special server that typically runs on a firewall machine.
 Their primary use is access to applications such as the World
Wide Web from within a secure perimeter.
 Instead of talking directly to external WWW servers, each
request from the client would be routed to a proxy on the
firewall that is defined by the user.
 Proxy knows how to get through the firewall. An application
level proxy makes a firewall safely permeable for users in an
organization, without creating a potential security hole
through which hackers can get into corporate networks.
 The proxy wait for a request from inside the firewall, forwards
the request to the remote server outside the firewall, reads the
response, and then returns it to the client.
 In the usual case, all clients within a given subnet use
the same proxy. This makes it possible for the proxy to
execute efficient caching of documents that are
requested by a number of clients.
 Advantages: They allow browser programmers to
ignore the complex networking code necessary to
support every firewall protocol and concentrate on
important client issues.
 For instance, by using HTTP between client and proxy,
no protocol functionality is lost, since FTP, Gopher, and
other Web protocols map well into HTTP methods.
 Proxies can manage network functions.
 Proxies allows for creating audit trails of client
transactions, including client IP addresses, date and
time, byte count, and success code.
 The proxy also can control access to services for
individual methods, host and domain, and the like.
 Given this firewall design in which the proxy acts as an
intermediary, it is natural to design security-relevant
mediation within the proxy.
 Proxy mediation helps mitigate security concerns by
 Limiting dangerous subsets of the HTTP protocol
.
 Enforcing client and/or server access to
designated hosts.
 Implementing access control for network services
that is lost when the proxy is installed.
 Checking various protocols for well-formed
commands.
 Hardened Firewall Hosts
 It is a stripped-down machine that has been configured
for increased security.
 This type of firewall requires inside or outside users to
connect to the trusted applications on the firewall
machine before connecting further.
 Generally these firewalls are configured to protect
against unauthenticated interactive log-ins from the
external worlds.
 This, more than anything, helps prevent unauthorized
users from logging into machines on the network.
 Creating a hardened host requires several steps, among
them:
 Hardened Firewall Hosts : Steps
 Removing all user accounts except those necessary for
operation of the firewall, the logic being that, if users
cannot log in to the firewall host, they cannot subvert
the security measures.
 Removing all non crucial files and executables,
especially network servers programs and client
programs like FTP and Telnet.
 Extending traffic logging and monitoring to check
remote access.
 Disabling IP forwarding to prevent the firewall from
forwarding unauthorized packets between the Internet
and the enterprise network.
 Hardened Firewall Hosts : Advantages
 Concentration of Security: All modified software and
logging is located on the firewall system as opposed to
being distributed on many hosts.
 Information Hiding: A firewall can “hide” names of
internal systems or e-mail addresses, thereby revealing
less information to outside hosts.
 Centralized and simplified network services
management: Services such as FTP, e-mail, Gopher,
and other similar services are located on the firewall
systems as opposed to being maintained on many
systems.
 Hardened Firewall Hosts : Design Problems
 The most obvious being that certain types of network
access may be blocked for some hosts, including
Telnet, FTP and X windows.
 It concentrates security in one spot as opposed to
distributing it among systems.
 Another potential problem is that relatively few
vendors have offered firewall system until very
recently.
 Security Policies and Firewall Management
 The firewall method of protection spans a continuum between
ease of use and paranoid security.
 Before putting a firewall in place, the administrator who has
the responsibility of designing, specifying, and implementing
or overseeing the installation of a firewall must address a
number of management issue.
 The first issue reflects the security policy of the organization.
Is the firewall in place explicitly to deny all services except
those integral to the mission of connecting to the Internet or is
the firewall in place to provide a metered and audited method
of regulating access in a nonthreatening manner?
 Many corporations and data centers have computing security
policies and practices that dictate how data must be protected.
A firewall is an embodiment of this security policy.
 The second issue is: what is the level of monitoring,
redundancy, and control? Having established the acceptable
risk level by resolving the first issue, a checklist is made of
what should be monitored, permitted, and denied.
 For instance, the firewall computer can control access based
on time of day, organizations might allow employees to run
e-mail or FTP at any time, but to read USENET new groups
only between
7 P.M and 8 A.M.
 Frequently technical design is dictated by financial
concerns: How much will it cost either to buy or to
implement? For example, a complete firewall product may
cost anywhere between $0 to $200,000.
 Firewall are poor protection against threat such as viruses.
The ways of encoding binary files for transfer over
networks are too numerous, and the formats and viruses
too varied, to monitor them all.
 In other words, a firewall cannot replace user security
consciousness. In general a firewall cannot protect against
data-driven attacks – attacks in which something is mailed
or copied to an internal host and then executed.
 A firewall provides more than real security – it often plays
an important role as security blanket for management.
 A firewall also acts as the corporate “ambassador” to the
other users of Internet.
3. Data and Message Security
1. Data Security
2. Message Security
Message confidentiality
1.
2. Message and System Integrity
3. Message Sender Authentication/Identification
3. Encryption as the Basis for Data and Message Security
1. Secret-key cryptography
2. Data Encryption Standard (DES)
3. Public-key Cryptography
4. RSA and Public Key Cryptography
5. Mixing RSA and DES
6. Digital Public-key certificates
7. Clipper chip
8. Digital Signatures
1. Digital Signature Standards(DSS).
Data and Message Security
 One of the main problem in Internets is lack of data
and message security.
 For instance, credit card numbers in their plain text
form create a risk when transmitted across the internet
where the possibility of the number falling into the
wrong hands is relatively high.
 Computer security was provided by the use of account
passwords and limited physical access to a facility to
bona fide user.
 This is sufficient for local users, but not for remote
users.
 Simple password schemes are not sufficient for remote
users.
 Today’s hacker has an array of tools to reach and
manipulate information from remote sites as well as
to engage in unauthorized eavesdropping.
 Transaction security issues can be divided into two
types.
 Data security and
 Message security.
eavesdropping
 Data Security
 Electronic data security is of paramount importance at a
time when people are considering banking and other
financial transactions by PCs.
 One major threat to data security is unauthorized
network monitoring, also called packet sniffing.
 Sniffer attacks begin when a computer is compromised
and the cracker installs a packet sniffing program that
monitors the network to which the machine is attached.
 The sniffer program watches for certain kinds of
network traffic, typically for the first part of any Telnet,
FTP, or rlogin sessions- sessions that legitimate users
initiate to gain access to another system.
 Data Security
 The first part of the session contains the log-in ID,
password, and user name of the person logging into
another machine, all the necessary information a sniffer
needs to log into other machines.
 One insecure system on a network can expose to
intrusion not only other local machine but also any
remote systems to which the users connect.
 The fact that some one can extract meaningful
information form network traffic is nothing new.
 If the compromised system is on a backbone network,
intruders can monitor any transit traffic traversing
between nodes on that network.
 Data Security
 Network monitoring car rapidly expand the number of
systems intruders are able to access, all with only
minimal impact on the systems being monitored.
 Users who accounts and passwords are collected will
not be aware that their sessions are being monitored,
and subsequent intrusions will happen via legitimate
accounts on the machines involved.
 Message Security
 Threats to message security fall into three
categories:
 Confidentiality
 Integrity
 Authentication
 Message Confidentiality
 Message Confidentiality
 Confidentiality is important for uses involving sensitive data
such as credit card numbers.
 This requirements will be amplified when other kinds of data,
such as employee records, government files, and social security
numbers, begin traversing the network.
 Confidentiality precludes access to, or release of, such
information to unauthorized users.
 The environment must protect all message traffic. After
successful delivery to their destination gateways, messages must
be removed from the public environment.
 All that remains is the accounting record of entry and delivery,
including message length, authentication data, and perhaps the
audit trail of message transfer agents that processed the message,
but no more.
 All message archiving must be performed in well-
protected systems.
 Provision must be made for the irrevocable emergency
destruction of stored, undelivered messages, where
necessary and when needed.
 The vulnerability of data communications and message
data to interception is exacerbated with the use of
distributed networks and wireless links.
 The need for securing the communications link
between computers via encryption is expected to rise.
 Message and System Integrity
 Business transactions require that their contents remain
unmodified during transport. In other words, information
received must have the same content and organization as
information sent.
 It must be clear that no one has added, deleted, or
modified any part of the message.
 Unauthorized combining of messages either by
intermixing or concatenating during submission,
validation, processing, or delivery should not be allowed.
 While confidentiality protects against the passive
monitoring of data, mechanisms for integrity must prevent
active attacks involving the modification of data.
 Error detection codes or checksums, sequence numbers,
and encryption techniques are methods to enhance
information integrity.
 Error detection codes operate on the entire message or
selected fields within a message.
 Sequence numbers prevent reordering, loss, or
replaying of messages by an attacker.
 Encryption techniques such as digital signatures can
detect modifications of a message.
 Digital signature
 Message Sender Authentication/Identification
 For e-commerce, it is important that clients authenticate
themselves to servers, that servers authenticate to clients,
that both authenticate to each other.
 Authentication is a mechanism whereby the receiver of a
transactions or message can be confident of the identity of
the sender and/or the integrity of the message.
 In other words, authentication verifies the identity of an
entity(a user or a service) using certain encrypted
information transferred from the sender to the receiver.
 The form of authentication, such as cryptographically
signed certificates, must not be easily spoofed (falsified).
 Whenever a message enters the public Internet for
transfer, it must bear some unambiguous identification of
the system from which it came.
 On the network this identification often takes the form of
the IP address. If the identification is lacking, the delivery
program will insert it.
 Sender authentication will be performed at the time a
sender submits a message and / or by a gateway system
when a message has been delivered to it.
 Consumer devices attached to the Internet will be
expected to generate an unambiguous origin
identification.
 Authentication in e-commerce basically requires the
user to prove his or her identity for each requested
service.
 The race among various vendors in the e-commerce
today is provide an authentication method that is easy
to use, secure, reliable, and scalable.
 Third-party authentication services must exist within a
distributed network environment where a sender cannot
be trusted to identify itself correctly to a receiver.
 In short, authentication plays an important role in the
implementation of business transaction security.
 Encryption as the basis for Data and Message
Security
 Sensitive information that must travel over public
channels can be defended by encrypting it.
 Encryption is the mutation of information in any
form(text, video, graphics) into a representation
unreadable by anyone without a decryption key.
 Suppose Ram wants to send you a message but doesn’t
want anyone but you to read it.
 Ram can encrypt or encipher, the message, which
means that Ram can scramble it in a hopelessly
complicated way, rendering it unreadable to anyone
except you, the intended recipient.
 Encryption as the basis for Data and Message Security
 Ram supplies a cryptographic “key” to encrypt the message,
and you have to use the same key to decipher or decrypt it.
 These are the basics of single-key cryptography.
 The general scenario in the case of business transactions is
as follows
 A wishes to send a purchase order(PO) to B in such a way
that only B can read it.
 A encrypts the PO, called the plaintext, with an encryption
key and sends the encrypted PO, called the cipher text, to B.
 B decrypts the cipher text with the decryption key and reads
the PO.
 A hacker C may obtain the cipher text as it passes on the
network, but without the decryption key it is impossible to
recover the message even if C has access to supercomputers.
Security
Encryption is the conversion of data into a form, called
a cipher text, that cannot be easily understood by
unauthorized people.
Decryption is the process of converting encrypted data
back into its original form, so it can be understood.
Security
Security
There are two types of encryption methods
Secret-key cryptography
Public-key cryptography
 Secret-Key Cryptography
 It is also called Symmetric Key encryption.
 Secret-Key cryptography uses the same key for both
encryption and decryption.
 Shared-key techniques suffer from the problem of key
distribution, since shared keys must be securely
distributed to each pair of communicating parties.
 Secure-key distribution becomes cumbersome in large
networks.
 A encrypts a message with a secret key and e-mails the encrypted
message to B. on receiving the message, B checks the header to
indentify the sender, the unlocks his electronic key storage area
and take out the duplicate of the secret key. B then uses the secret
key to decrypt the message.
 Here the problem is there is a chance to hacking the
secret key by the third person, because A has to send the
secret key to B, he has to use any one of the public
transmission system(Phone, or Postal).
 The generation, transmission, and storage of keys is
called key management; all cryptosystems must deal
with key management issues.
 Although the secret-key method is quite feasible and
practical for one-on-one document interchange; it does
not scale.
 In a business environment where a company deals with
thousands of on-line customers, it is impractical to
assume that key management will be flawless.
 One of the Secret-key algorithm is DES, Data
Encryption Standard.
 Secret-Key Cryptography: Data Encryption Standard.
 The DES software is readily available at free of cost in the
internet.
 Introduced in 1975 by IBM, the National Security Agency
(NSA), and the National Bureau of Standards(NBS).
 DES is the most well-known and widely used
cryptosystem in the world.
 DES is a secret-key, symmetric cryptosystem: when used
for communication, both sender and the receiver must
know the same secret key, which is used both to encrypt
and decrypt the message.
 DES can also be used for single user encryption, for
example, to store files on a hard disk in encrypted form.
 In a multiuser environment, however, secure-key
distribution becomes difficult.
 DES operates on 64-bit blocks with a 56-bit secret key.
 Designed for hardware implementation, its operation is
relatively fast and works well for large bulk documents
or encryption.
 It was the first encryption algorithm approved by the
U.S. government for public disclosure.
 The simplicity of DES also saw it used in a wide variety
of embedded systems, smart cards, SIM cards and
network devices requiring encryption like modems, set-
top boxes and routers.
 DES uses a 64-bit key, but eight of those bits are
used for parity checks, effectively limiting the key to
56-bits. Hence, it would take a maximum of 2^56, or
72,057,594,037,927,936, attempts to find the correct
key.
 So it is possible to find out the key using a brute
force attack(trying to break the cypher by using all
possible keys).
 A new technique for improving the security of DES
is triple encryption (Triple DES), that is, encrypting
each message block using three different keys in
succession.
 Secret-Key Cryptography: Data Encryption
Standard.
 Triple DES, thought to be equivalent to doubling
the key size of DES, to 112 bits, should prevent
decryption by a third party capable of single key
exhaustive search.
 Of course, using triple encryption takes three times
as long as single-encryption DES.
 Public-Key Cryptography:
 Public-key techniques involve a pair of keys; a
private key and a public key.
 Information encrypted by the public key can be
decrypted only using the corresponding decrypted
only using the corresponding private key.
 The private key, used to decrypt transmitted
information, is kept secret.
 The public key is used to encrypt information and is
not kept secret.
 Pubic keys can be maintained in some central
repository and retrieved to decode or encode
information.
 Each party to a public key pairing receives a pair of
keys, the public key and the private key.
 When A wishes to send a message to B, A looks up
B’s public key in a directory, A then uses the public
key to encrypt the message and mail it to B.
 B uses the secret private key to decrypt the message
and read it.
 Anyone can send an encrypted message to B but
only B can read it. Unless, a third party(C), has access
to B’s private key, it is impossible to decrypt the
message sent by A. this ensures Confidentiality
 Public-Key Cryptography: Advantages
 It is that no one can figure out the private key from
the corresponding public key.
 The need for sender and receiver to share secret
information over public channels is completely
eliminated.
 Public key cryptography can be used for sender
authentication, known as digital signatures.
 Digital Signature:
 A wishes to send digitally sign a document, puts his
private key and the document together and performs a
computation on the composite (key + document) to
generate a unique number called the digital signature.
 When an electronic document, such as an order form
with a credit card number, is run through the method, the
output is a unique “fingerprint” of the document.
 This “fingerprint” is attached to the original message and
further encrypted with the signer A’s private key.
 The result of the second encryption is then sent to B,
who then first decrypts the document using A’s public
key.
 Digital Signature:
 B checks whether the message has been tampered with or
is coming from a third party C, posing as A.
 To verify the signature, B does some further computation
involving the original document, the purported signature,
and A’s public key.
 If the results of the computation generate a matching
“ fingerprint” of the document, the digital signature is
verified as genuine; otherwise, the signature may be
fraudulent or the message altered, and they are discarded.
 This method is the basis for secure e-commerce, variations
of which are being explored by several companies.
 Public-Key Cryptography: RSA.
 RSA is a public-key cryptosystem for both encryption
and authentication developed in 1977 by Ron Rivest,
Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adlemen.
 RSA’s system uses a matched pair of encryption and
decryption keys, each performing a one-way
transformation of the data.
 RSA is also developing digital signatures, which are
mathematical algorithms that encrypt an entire
document.
 RSA is important because it enables digital signatures,
which can be used to authenticate electronic documents
the same way handwritten signatures are used to
authenticate paper documents.
 Here’s how a digital signature works for an electronic
document to be sent from the sender X to the receiver Y:
 X runs a program that uses a has algorithm to generate a
digital fingerprint – a pattern of bits that uniquely
identifies a much larger pattern of bits – for the document
and encrypts the fingerprint with his private key.
 This is X’s digital signature, which is transmitted along
with the data.
 Y decrypts the signature with X’s public key and runs the
same hash program on the document.
 If the digital fingerprint output by the hash program does
not match the fingerprint sent by X(after that has been
decrypted), then Y can be signature is invalid.
 If the fingerprints do match, however, then Y can be
quite sure that the digital signature is authentic.
 If the document were altered en route, the fingerprints
will not match (the output from the hash programs will
be different) and the receiver will know that data
tampering occurred.
 If the sender’s signature has been forged, the fingerprint
won’t match either.
 Therefore the digital signature verifies both the identity
of the sender and the authenticity of the data in the
document.
 RSA is currently used in a wide variety of products,
platforms, and industries around the world.
 It is being incorporated into the World Wide Web
browsers such as Netscape, giving it wider audience.
 In hardware, RSA can be found in secure telephones,
on Ethernet network cards, and on smart cards.
 Adoption of RSA seems to be processing more quickly
for authentication (digital signatures) than for privacy
(encryption).
 Mixing RSA and DES.
 RSA allows two important functions not provided by
DES:
 Secure key exchange without prior exchange of keys, and
 Digital signatures.
 For encrypting messages, RSA and DES are usually
combined as follows:
 First the message is encrypted with a random DES key, then,
before being sent over an insecure communications channel,
the DES key is encrypted with RSA.
 Together, the DES – encrypted message and the RSA encrypted
DES key are sent.
 This protocol is known as an RSA Digital Envelope.
 Mixing RSA and DES.
 RSA may be fine for small messages, DES is preferable
for larger messages due to its greater speed.
 In some situations, RSA is not necessary and DES
alone is sufficient, for example, in multiuser
environments where secure DES-key agreement can
take place.
 RSA is usually not necessary in a single-user
environment; for example, if your want to keep your
personal files encrypted, just do so with DES using,
say, a password as the DES key.
 RSA and public-key cryptography is general, is best
suited for a multi user environment.
 Digital Public-key Certificates.
 A public key certificate (also known as a digital
certificate or identity certificate) is an electronic
document used to prove ownership of a public key.
 Keys are intended to be public and widely distributed,
secrecy is not a concern; anyone should be able to get a
copy of a public key. Rather, the primary concern is
authenticity.
 If A in England is doing business with B in Canada and
wants to encrypt information so that only B can read it, A
must first get the public key of B from a key directory.
That’s where the problem lies.
 There is nothing that says that this public key information
is valid and not a forgery put there by C impersonating B.
 One solution to this problem is a public-key certificate.
A public key certificate is a data structure, digitally
signed by a certification authority, that binds a public –
key value to the identify of the entity holding the
corresponding private key.
 The latter entity is known as the subject of the
certificate. In essence, a certificate is a copy of a public
key and an identifier, digitally signed by a trusted party.
 The problem is then transformed into finding a trusted
third party to create these certificates.
 A public key user needs to obtain and validate a
certificate containing the required public key. This is
where its complicated.
 If the public key user does not already have a copy of
the public key of the trusted party that signed the
certificate, then the user may need an additional
certificate to get that public key.
 I such cases, a chain of multiple certificated may be
needed, comprising a certificate of the public-key
owner signed by one certification authority, and
additional certificates of certification authorities by
other certification authorities.
 Clipper Chip.
 Chipper is an encryption chip developed as part of the
Capstone project.
 Announced by the White House in April 1993, clipper
was designed to balance the competing concerns of
federal law enforcement agencies with those of private
citizens and industry.
 Law enforcement agencies wish to have access – for
example, by wire tapping – to the communications of
suspected criminals, and these needs are threatened by
secure cryptography.
 Clipper technology is used in telecommunications.
 Clipper Chip.
 The communications would be encrypted with a secure
algorithm, but he keys would be kept by one or more third
parties ( the “escrow agencies”) and made available to law
enforcement agencies when authorized by a court-issued
warrant.
 Skipjack was invented by the National Security Agency of
the U.S. Government; this algorithm was initially classified
SECRET.
 It is the encryption algorithm contained in the Clipper chip.
 It uses one 80-bit key to encrypt and decrypt 64-bit blocks
of data.
 Skipjack can be used in the same way as DES and may be
more secure than DES.
 Clipper Chip.
 Since, it uses 80-bit keys and scrambles the data for 32
steps, or “rounds”; by contrast, DES uses 56 bit keys
and scrambles the data for only 16 rounds.
 Skipjack is not public, the same scrutiny cannot be
applied, and thus a corresponding level of confidence
may not arise.
 Aware of such criticism, the government invited a small
group of independent cryptographers to examine the
Skipjack algorithm.
 Skipjack is cannot be implemented in software, but
only in hardware by government-authorized chip
manufacturers.
 Digital Signatures. (Digital Signature Standard)
 The signature is an unforgeable piece of data asserting
that a named person wrote or otherwise agreed to the
document to which the signature is attached.
 A secure digital signature system thus consists of two
parts: a method of signing a document such that forgery
is infeasible, and a method of verifying that a signature
was actually generated by whomever it represents.
 Digital Signature Standard (DSS)
 The Digital Signature Standard specifies a Digital
Signature Algorithm (DSA) as part of the U.S
government’s Capstone project.
 Digital Signatures: Digital Signature Standard
 It was selected to be the digital authentication standard
of the U.S government; whether the government should
in fact adopt it as the official standard is still under
debate.

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E-Commerce and its Application

1. Client Server Security

1. Client Server Security

2. Firewalls and Network Security

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