Note: this topic was not fully addressed due to time limitations and the complexity of the issues involved.

Security is understood to include protection of the privacy of information, protection of information against unauthorized modification, protection of systems against denial of service, and protection of systems against unauthorized access. Network security addresses these issues in a networked environment.

The development of network security standards facilitates the interoperability between security service implementations.

“RSA is a public-key cryptosystem for both encryption and authentication; it was invented in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. It works as follows: take two large primes, p and q, and find their product n = pq; n is called the modulus. Choose a number, e, less than n and relatively prime to (p-1)(q-1), and find its inverse, d, mod (p-1)(q-1), which means that ed = 1 mod (p-1)(q-1); e and d are called the public and private exponents, respectively. The public key is the pair (n,e); the private key is d. The factors p and q must be kept secret, or destroyed.” (http://www.qualix.com/html/rsa.html)

“DES is the Data Encryption Standard, an encryption block cipher defined and endorsed by the U.S. government in 1977 as an official standard; the details can be found in the official FIPS publication. It was originally developed at IBM. DES has been extensively studied over the last 15 years and 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 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, such as to store files on a hard disk in encrypted form. In a multi-user environment, secure key distribution may be difficult; public-key cryptography was invented to solve this problem.” (http://www.qualix.com/html/des.html)

“Capstone is the U.S. government's long-term project to develop a set of standards for publicly-available cryptography, as authorized by the Computer Security Act of 1987. The primary agencies responsible for Capstone are NIST and the NSA (see above). The plan calls for the elements of Capstone to become official U.S. government standards, in which case both the government itself and all private companies doing business with the government would be required to use Capstone.” (http://www.qualix.com/html/cstone.html)

“Clipper is an encryption chip developed and sponsored by the U.S. government 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. The law-enforcement agencies wish to have access to the communications of suspected criminals, for example by wire-tapping; these needs are threatened by secure cryptography. Industry and individual citizens, however, want secure communications, and look to cryptography to provide it.” (http://www.qualix.com/html/cstone.html)

“Skipjack is the encryption algorithm contained in the Clipper chip; it was designed by the NSA. It uses an 80-bit key to encrypt 64-bit blocks of data; the same key is used for the decryption. Skipjack can be used in the same modes as DES, and may be more secure than DES, 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.” (http://www.qualix.com/html/cstone.html)

“DSS is the proposed Digital Signature Standard, which specifies a Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA), and is a part of the U.S. government's Capstone project. It was selected by NIST, in cooperation with the NSA, 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. DSS is based on the discrete log problem and derives from cryptosystems proposed by Schnorr and ElGamal. It is for authentication only.” (http://www.qualix.com/html/cstone.html)

NIST, NSA, MD2, MD4, MD5 (MD stands for Message Digest), SHS, Kerberos, RC2, RC4, PEM, RIPEM, PKCS, RSAREF.

The following security guidelines address the entire Internet community, consisting of users, hosts, local, regional, domestic and international backbone networks, and vendors who supply operating systems, routers, network management tools, workstations and other network components. Five areas should be addressed in improving local security:

On January 9, 1997, the Governor’s Task Force On Information Resource Management released ‘Technology Policy 97-1 Information Security Policy.’ It states that “This document is designed to provide State agencies with recommended minimum security policies for protection of assets inclusive of information, computers, and networks.” It provides physical access security guidances on Secure Locations, Location Selection, Review of New Collections to Outside Sources, Review of Installation, Platform-specific Physical Security, External Network Access to Agency Information, Transaction Controls and Database Security, Downloading Software, Non-Agency Owned IT Components, Agency Owned IT Components and Logging.