Secure Applications and Protocols For Cloud Networks – If you’ve been following along other articles you should be pretty comfortable with a lot of different encryption algorithms that we use in today’s I.T. world. What I want to do now is take these algorithms and actually plug them into the real world to see real protocols and real applications that use AES or RSA or whatever it might be.
Now before we do that I want to make sure you’re comfortable with something. When we talk about networking and technology today, we’re pretty much talking about the world of TCP/IP and the Internet as a whole. So when we’re doing encryption we’re usually talking about the Internet and everything on the Internet runs on top of TCP/IP.
TCP/IP And Internet
Now that’s important because TCP/IP and the Internet really kind of predate encryption. The whole world of TCP/IP and what eventually became the Internet. It was open and free man. It was all cool. Well the first time somebody logged in to eBay to buy a pair of sneakers suddenly motivated us to get into the world of encryption. Now encryption predates the World Wide Web. But the important thing I need you to get in your head right now is that we had all kinds of applications out there. So the best place to start and secure applications is to understand a very very famous encrypted protocol called ssh.
Also Read: IT Security Governance And Responsibilities – CompTIA Security
SSH Protocol
Let say we have a laptop running an ssh server called free ssh, a wonderful free ssh server. And on main machine we are m running the very popular putty program. Putty is a client for all kinds of stuff. But in this case we’re going to be running putty as an ssh client and connecting to this guy. Connect with the port 22.
Everybody gets a symmetric key and then you use a symmetric key to send all your encoded data and ssh certainly works just like that. Now if you’ll take a look there are three different kinds of Diffie- Hellman here don’t worry about the different kinds just know that it’s got three different ways to do Diffie-Hellman and then it has RSA.
Transport Layer Security (TLS)
When you connect to a web page the web page itself by default is not encrypted. So what we do is we use a protocol called Transport Layer Security or TLS which actually acts as an intermediary between the web page and our individual web browser and acts as an intermediary that does all the encryption. So what will happen is we build these protocols into our web servers and to our web clients to make that work. Now what’s actually cool about TLS is that TLS was invented for Web sites.
