This paper is going to discuss and compare several terms within network security. The terms to be discussed are historical and statistical logging, file security and firewalls, secret and public keys, symmetric and asymmetric keys and lastly digital certificates and digital postmarks. It will also include a short explanation on the type of security that is associated with each level of the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) Model.
Historical and Statistical Logging.
Historical logging is a complete recording of all data passed through a particular device. These devices can include databases being accessed and can be as intricate as recording every keystroke and mouse click performed by the end user. It will also track the user's ID and the device being used. All of this data is commonly collected by host computers and stored on many different backup devices like CD, disk or tape. .
Statistical logging is a more efficient but similar method to historical logging, but statistics are kept on each data port instead. This statistics might include which users were logged on to which ports, the amount of time logged on, the files accessed, and other information about transactions that occurred. All of this data can be stored in the same way as historical logging, but it takes up less memory. .
These two logging techniques are reactive to what is going on within a network. They are not proactive and therefore cannot prevent security breaches, but they both play a key role to an administrator or security expert because they can see exactly what happened after the events have happened. The differences between the two are efficiency and where they capture their data. .
File Security and Firewalls.
An administrator or other network personnel administers file security. File security is applied to users and groups to give them permission that will either grant or deny them access to files. Once these permissions are granted, the user has the ability to read, write or execute a particular file.