IACT303 – INTI 2005 World Wide Networking Security and Next Generation Networking Technologies University of Wollongong

Confidence in the Internet Over the last few years we have begun to witness the use of the Internet soar. Businesses and Government agencies demand an Internet Infrastructure that is robust, transparent and secure. The catalysts for these changes have been increasing costs and the increased pervasiveness of the net.

Many years ago organisations established private networks made out of leased lines. This culture has changed, there has been a great dependence on the Internet.

The Changing Nature of business on the Net. Two major innovations which are effecting the way organisations use the Internet are; –IPsec (Secure Internet Protocol). –VPN’s (Virtual Private Networks). The rationale for these varies technologies relates to cost and the abundance of technology/ networking.

Secure Internet Protocol (IPsec) IPsec is being defined/developed by the IPsec working group which is part of the IETF. The deployment of IPsec was influenced by the private sector, in particular IBM who described how to implement many of the RFC’s. The technology however was initially hampered by the US government.

US legislation prohibited the exportation of cryptographic algorithms. As a consequence the development of IPsec has moved to other parts of the world. There are still a number of obstacles in IPsec.

In order to understand what IPsec is, you need to understand the concept of a tunnel. A tunnel is basically a link between two nodes (endpoints). The tunnel is used to move a multitude of protocols i.e. HTTP, FTP etc. IPsec defines the concept of a secure tunnel on an unsecured network i.e. the Internet.

The actual passing of the traffic between the two points in a secure tunnel depends upon, the protocols, keys and cryptographic regimes (algorithms). IPsec defines the protocol for establishing secure communications for a number of protocols between two nodes or a number of networks. It describes the exchange of key, algorithms and trusting. It should be noted that this is an extension to the IP protocol which influence its transport.

Diagrammatically it looks like this; SECURE TUNNEL OVER INTERNET BETWEEN TWO ENDPOINTS

Virtual Private Networks Organisations want security and privacy when they perform transactions. In the past this was achieved by using leased lines. It was not uncommon for organisations for have transcountry or transoceanic private links. However this is expensive and inflexible.

The pervasiveness of the Internet has given a number of organisations the ability to globalise. Organisations have been able to establish private links also known as tunnels over the Internet. These links are used between a number of entities in an organisation. This concept is called a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Most VPN’s use the IPsec protocol. However there are a number of other solutions. One of the simplest is tunneling traffic over secure shell links between two end points. Many network vendors and software houses are developing solutions for the business community which enhance this concept. It is not very difficult to understand but it is important to the growth of the Internet and future business.

What is the Semantic Web? The current web is comprised of natural language documents as well as media. OK for people but machines are not able to interpret this information very well Semantic Web will provide automated access to information based on machine- processable data. The Semantic Web is envisioned to be the latest evolution of the Internet

HTML, XML and E- commerce The use of XML represents one area that assists in better defining the structure of documentation online HTML is used to describe how the documents is presented XML is used to describe the structure of a document ie what the data is.

Semantic Web Ontologies The means by which data will gain meaning to machines is through a layered architecture that provides increasingly complex methods to describe relationships and attach meaning to certain words and sentences (and possibly concepts)

RDF Resource Description Frameworks are normally modelled using XML. RDFs are statements that have been modelled comprising: –Resources: an element, a URI, –Properties: directed relations between two resources. –Statements: “triplets” of two resources bound by a property Resource Property Resource –E,g Will (Teacher is a resource) teaches (Property) IACT417 (Course is a resource) Triplets: subject, predicate, object

Ontologies Essentially ontologies contain “specification of a conceptualisation” - that is defined terms and relationships between them, usually in some formal and machine readable manner” (Hendler, 2002, p. 30) Enable deductions to be made about data –E.g. “if «A» is left of «B» and «B» is left of «C», «A» is also left of «C»?”

Semantic Web Recent Developments The w3c has recently announced a revised RDF Schema and a web ontology language called OWL as the official languages of the Semantic web The intention is to build Web Service Applications in RDF and OWL. There is no thought of a killer application

Tim Berners Lee’s advice Deployment –Work RDF into products –Legacy adapters - registry - shopping list –Evangelism: using other people's terms –Find “low-hanging” fruit It took 20 years for relational data bases to be deployed – will the semantic web take as long?