Network Security Report for BIT243: Security Techniques and Processes

This report provides a comprehensive overview of network security, focusing on security architecture and its components. It delves into the importance of cryptography, including symmetric and asymmetric algorithms, and their role in ensuring data integrity, confidentiality, authentication, and authorization. The report also examines Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDS and IPS), highlighting their functionalities and the security implementation process. Furthermore, it explores effective security techniques like digital signatures, network authentication, access controls, and identity management. The conclusion emphasizes the ongoing challenges in network security and the significance of implementing these techniques to safeguard organizational data. The report is a solution for the BIT243 Network Security assignment, offering insights into designing and implementing security measures to reduce cyber-attacks and improve system security.

Network security
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Introduction
Security architecture focus on the requirements and potential risks faced by
business in a specific technological environment.
To meet business requirements, security architecture highlights instances when
security controls are applicable.
To make the network architecture reliable by organizations, it should be
considered to be a design with unique structure that addresses its components.

Security architecture concepts
Cryptography has been designed as a security measure to prevent organizational data
from malicious activities.
Cryptography aims at strengthening data security principles such as; data integrity,
confidentiality, authentication and authorization.
Cryptographic algorithms such as asymmetric and symmetric encryption are very
important.
Symmetric are mainly used in traditional data encryption and it make use of single
key for both encryption and decryption.

Security architecture concepts cont..’
The strength of symmetric algorithm depends on the size of the key which is
naturally exponential.
Asymmetric algorithms makes use of two different set of key for encryption and
decryption.
Both encryption and decryption keys form private and public keys used for
decoding and encoding the data.
In asymmetric, it is not possible to calculate the strength of the corresponding
key.

Intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS and IPS)
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are used in organizational network and
information systems to detect any form of attack in advance.
Once malicious activities are detected, system administrator makes use of
Intrusion prevention system (IPS) to prevent attacks from happening.
Both IDS and IPS work to complement each other because IDS detects the
attacker and IPS prevents takes necessary actions to prevent the attacker.

IDS/IPS infrastructure

Security implementation process
Security implementation process would be suitable for both upgrading existing
and new network.
Analyze organizational existing network to evaluate vulnerabilities
Evaluate both physical and logical network security components.
Design or integrate network proposals into organizational network.
Review network security to make sure it aligns to business requirements and
principles.

Effective use of security techniques
There are several security measures that can be implemented by
organizations to secure its network and data.
Digital signature which can be used to secure network by
validating both authenticity and integrity of the message.
Digital signatures functionality is based on public key message
encryption.
The digital signature technology assumes all parties should be
able to store their decoding keys securely.

Effective use of security techniques cont..’
Network authentication determines whether user has the right credentials to
access organizational data.
Access controls serve as an effective measure of controlling access of
recourses to authorized system users.
Identity management outlines measures and technologies put in place to
provide access to the organizational resources.

Conclusion
Network security remains a great challenge in todays technological infrastructure.
 Cryptography such as asymmetric and symmetric algorithms have been adopted
by organizations to secure its data.
IDS and IPS are some of the modern technologies that organizations can use to
detect and prevent malicious activities.
Security techniques such as access controls, authentication, digital signatures and
identity management should be implemented to secure organizational data.

Bibliography
Alam, M. and Bin, S., 2017. Cloud Computing–Architecture, Platform and
Security Issues: A Survey. World Scientific News, 86(3), pp.253-264.
Kauspadiene, L., Cenys, A., Goranin, N., Tjoa, S. and Ramanauskaite, S., 2017.
High-Level Self-Sustaining Information Security Management Framework.
Baltic Journal of Modern Computing, 5(1), p.107.
Sherman, A.T., DeLatte, D., Neary, M., Oliva, L., Phatak, D., Scheponik, T.,
Herman, G.L. and Thompson, J., 2018. Cybersecurity: Exploring core concepts
through six scenarios. Cryptologia, 42(4), pp.337-377.
Sicari, S., Cappiello, C., De Pellegrini, F., Miorandi, D. and Coen-Porisini, A.,
2016. A security-and quality-aware system architecture for Internet of Things.
Information Systems Frontiers, 18(4), pp.665-677.