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Chapter: Cryptography and Network Security Principles and Practice : Overview

The OSI Security Architecture

For our purposes, the OSI security architecture provides a useful, if abstract, overview of many of the concepts that this book deals with. The OSI security archi-tecture focuses on security attacks, mechanisms, and services.

THE OSI SECURITY ARCHITECTURE

 

To assess effectively the security needs of an organization and to evaluate and choose various security products and policies, the manager responsible for security needs some systematic way of defining the requirements for security and characterizing the approaches to satisfying those requirements. This is difficult enough in a centralized data processing environment; with the use of local and wide area networks, the problems are compounded.

ITU-T3 Recommendation X.800, Security Architecture for OSI, defines such a systematic approach.4 The OSI security architecture is useful to managers as a way of organizing the task of providing security. Furthermore, because this architecture was developed as an international standard, computer and communications vendors have developed security features for their products and services that relate to this structured definition of services and mechanisms.

 

For our purposes, the OSI security architecture provides a useful, if abstract, overview of many of the concepts that this book deals with. The OSI security archi-tecture focuses on security attacks, mechanisms, and services. These can be defined briefly as

 

             Security attack: Any action that compromises the security of information owned by an organization.

 

             Security mechanism: A process (or a device incorporating such a process) that is designed to detect, prevent, or recover from a security attack.

 

             Security service: A processing or communication service that enhances the security of the data processing systems and the information transfers of an organization. The services are intended to counter security attacks, and they make use of one or more security mechanisms to provide the service.

 

In the literature, the terms threat and attack are commonly used to mean more or less the same thing. Table 1.1 provides definitions taken from RFC 2828, Internet Security Glossary.





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