Primary Goals of Network Security

For today's networks, the demand of e-commerce and customer contact require network connectivity between internal enterprise networks and the outside world. Because almost all enterprise networks require some kind of network security, consider the three primary goals of network security:

Confidentiality: Data confidentiality implies keeping the data secure. This security could entail physically or logically locking down access to sensitive data or encrypting traffic that passes over the network. A network that provides confidentiality would do provide the following security practices:

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- Provide network security mechanisms that would include: firewalls, Intrusion Prevention System and access control lists to restrict unauthorized access to network resources.

- Require valid credentials for example; require usernames and passwords to access resources on the network.

- Encrypt traffic so that an attacker could not read any traffic he captured from the network.

Integrity: Data integrity ensures that data has not been tampered with in transit. Data integrity also might perform authentication to verify that the traffic is coming from the source that should be sending it. Some examples of integrity violations include:

- Changing the appearance of a company's website
- Intercepting and modifying an e-commerce transaction
- Changing financial records that are kept electronically

Availability: The availability of data is the measure of data's accessibility. For example, if a server went down five minutes out of the year, it would have an uptime of 99.999 percent. A few examples of how an attacker could attempt to compromise the available of a network.

- An attacker could send malicious packets to a networked device, resulting in an unhandled exception error.

- An attacker could flood the network with an excessive amount of traffic. This would use up all the systems resources and prevent the system from responding to legitimate user requests. This type of attack is called a denial of service attack.

Primary Goals of Network Security

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