Information System Cryptography

Question: Discuss about the Information Systemfor Cryptography. Answer: Cryptography can be defined as protecting the data or information by changing the whole information into something which is not readable by normal human beings mainly in some sort of numbers or combination of numbers and alphabets. The format in which it is written is called Cipher text. In order to decrypt the code, one of the user should hold a secret key or decipher by which they can get to know the real code and read it in plain text. The encrypted messages can also be broken using cryptanalysis and is called code breaking (Buchmann, 2013). Cryptography is generally used to secure information in an e-mail message, credit card information and corporate data. Cryptography systems can be classified into two parts that is Symmetric Systems and Asymmetric Systems. Symmetric Systems Symmetric Encryption is one of the oldest and the most used technique and is also the best known among them. To encrypt information, it uses a number or an array of strings of random letters which can be applied on information to change the content. To decrypt the same information, the receiver should also have the same secret key so that the message can be decoded. For two communicating parties, using the symmetric encryption for secure communication, the key holds a shared secret between the two. There are many symmetric encryption algorithms present such as AES, DES, Blowfish and Skipjack. It is more useful than asymmetric encryption and mainly used for encoding a bulk of data. Symmetric key ciphers are much useful as it is relatively inexpensive for these ciphers to produce a strong key. The keys are mainly used for any small protection level and the algorithms that are used here are relatively inexpensive to use as well as process (Katz Lindell, 2014). Implementing symmetric cr yptography is quite easy and can be highly effective as it does not give any significant time when it comes to encryption and decryption. Symmetric cryptography can also provide a degree of authentication because the code that is encoded with Symmetric Encryption cannot be decrypted with any other Symmetric key. Therefore in order to decode a code, both the parties need to keep the keys within themselves in order to decrypt the message. Asymmetric Encryption There is a problem with exchanging of the keys over the internet or a large network that is it can fall in to someone elses hand. Anyone knowing the secret key can easily decrypt the message. For the asymmetric encryption, there are mainly two related keys are present that are a pair. Public key is something which is freely available to everyone whoever wants to send the message and the second is the private key which needs to be kept save and is known to the end user only. Any message that needs to get encrypted needs the public key and can be decrypted by using the same algorithm but with the help of matching private key (Buchmann, 2013). The message which is encrypted using public key can be accessed with the matching public key. The advantage of using asymmetric encryption is that public keys are already available over the internet so it needs not to be shared but in order to decrypt the message the same matching private key is needed. The only problem that asymmetric encryption faces is that it is very much slower than later one and more processing power is required in order to encrypt and decrypt the message. Application of cryptography is that it can used in mailing system or even when data is uploaded it is encrypted using public key and is decoded by the user who uses the same private key. Advantage of encrypting the data is that to decode it, computers will need very long time to decode without proper keys (Katz Lindell, 2014.) Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a type of software that is meant to alert automatically administrators if someone is tries to enter without proper authorization into the network system or with the help of malicious activities or making some policy violations. It generally works by monitoring system activities through finding vulnerabilities in the system. This is done by performing a thorough analysis of the networks which are already stored in the network for the known attacks. It also helps in by automatically monitoring the internet and search for any latest threats which could help in preventing any future attacks (Kenkre, Pai Colaco, 2015). Intrusion Detection System is followed a series of processes that is host based which are considered to be the passive component and includes system configuration files which are mainly used to detect anomalies if there are any files are missing or not. Intrusion Detection System performs in various ways. In signature based detection, th e present signature is compared with any previous signatures to get a match to discover the current threats. This is quite useful for finding any known threats but not useful when it comes to finding any unknown threats or the threats that are hidden. Second type of detection is Statistical anomaly based detection where any such anomaly will be decided by the IDS and monitored. It mainly works with the network traffic and compares it against baseline (Liao et al., 2013). Another type is Anomaly based detection which compares the behavior of threats with previously happened threats so to get a match. Intrusion Detection System is mainly works on three components that is Network Node Intrusion Detection System (NNIDS), Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) and Host Intrusion Detection System (HIDS). Network Intrusion detection system helps to analyze the traffic present on the subnet and will try to make a match to the traffic that is passing continuously by the attacker which are known to the library for future reference. In Network Node Intrusion Detection System, it is similar to the previous one but here single host monitors the passing traffic and not on a whole network which makes it quite easy to find any problem if any persists. The third is the Host Intrusion Detection System which takes account of the whole system and compares it with previously taken traffic records (Kenkre, Pai Colaco, 2015). If there are significant differences, like some files are missing or something like that, it automatically alerts the administrator about the anomaly. A reactive Intrusion Detection System helps in detecting any unknown behavioral changes and alerts the administrator but before notifying the administrator, it will try to eliminate the threat from its own. This means that it will block any incoming traffic from the source IP address or the user (Liao et al., 2013). Intrusion Detection System was developed to keep track of the websites that are attacked on th eir network level which includes the Pentagon, the White House, NATO and the US Defense Department. With the help of this, safeguarding of security is becoming more and more difficult as the possible technologies of attacks are becoming more and more complicated and also at the same time, technical ability is also reducing so as to track the attacker. Also second procedures include the active component that are network based. References Buchmann, J. (2013).Introduction to cryptography. Springer Science Business Media. Katz, J., Lindell, Y. (2014).Introduction to modern cryptography. CRC press. Kenkre, P. S., Pai, A., Colaco, L. (2015). Real time intrusion detection and prevention system. InProceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Frontiers of Intelligent Computing: Theory and Applications (FICTA) 2014(pp. 405-411). Springer International Publishing. Liao, H. J., Lin, C. H. R., Lin, Y. C., Tung, K. Y. (2013). Intrusion detection system: A comprehensive review.Journal of Network and Computer Applications,36(1), 16-24.