Network Security: Intro and Overview

Goals

  • Understand the unique challenges of network security
    • And why traditional crypto is often orthogonal
  • Recall basics of networking
  • Understand IDS and firewall basics
  • Explain the base-rate fallacy

What is Network Security?

  • Why doesn’t crypto solve network security issues?
  • What are four prototypical network security goals?

Network Attacks and Defenses

  • Why are networks often vulnerable?
  • What are common Internet threats?
  • What are some common “rules of thumb” for secure networking?

Firewalls

  • How are firewalls classified?
    • Give examples of different options along each possible dimension

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS)

  • What are two categories of IDS?
  • How can an IDS be bypassed?

Detection Theory

  • How is the intrusion rate defined?
  • How is the alert rate defined?
  • What do sound and complete mean in this context?
  • What is a false positive/negative in this context?
  • How does the Bayesian detection rate differ from the detection rate?
    • Which is a better meaure of an IDS?
  • What is an ROC curve, and why is it useful?