Monday, June 29, 2020

A comprehensive approach to network security

The magnitude of the losses from network attacks in monetary terms is staggering. It is believed that the Blaster worm alone caused damage from $ 500 million to $ 1 billion. Of course, there are many vulnerabilities on the Internet, and the information security industry must redouble its efforts to combat them. However, developing and improving existing methods, one should not forget about fundamentally new approaches to solving security problems.

It is necessary to establish the required level of security when creating content, transferring it, and consuming by the end user. But how can corporations ensure the security of their information / networks?

The most important factor in an orderly, systematic approach is the creation of a security architecture that will help security professionals identify the security requirements that are critical to the day-to-day operations (whether it concerns the safety of personnel, networks or information).

The network security model developed at Bella Lab (a research unit of Lucent Technologies) and adopted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as the basis for X.805 Recommendations offers an architectural approach to network security. This fills the "gaps" of existing standards, providing a holistic network security architecture consisting of eight dimensions that relate to both end-users and network, service and application management issues security architect job description.

X.805 recommendations were created to address the global security challenges of service providers, industrial enterprises, and consumers, and are applicable to wireless, optical, and wired broadcast lines, data networks, and converged networks. The security architecture takes into account the protection of network management information, signaling, end-user traffic, and it can also be applied to network elements, services, and applications.

Security matrix model

The network security model is based on its representation in the form of a matrix with 72 attributes. The model is applicable to network elements, services, and applications and allows for the prediction, detection, and correction of security vulnerabilities. It can be used by government, commercial institutions and network providers to assess the security of a network using any protocol.

The X.805 standard can be applied to develop security policies and network security requirements, as well as to assess the security of existing networks. This standard is independent of the network technologies used and is applicable at all levels of the protocol stack. Designing networks based on this standard will provide an all-encompassing security architecture, leading to the emergence of new, revenue-generating security services, such as service level agreements (SLAs).

End-to-end traffic and security threats

Security is examined by the Bella Laboratory not only in the context of individual products or services, but also from a system perspective. In particular, the security architecture allows end-to-end security, and this is one of X.805’s significant achievements.

The X.805 Recommendations address five major threats to telecommunication networks:

destruction of information and / or other resources;
distortion or modification of information;
deletion, substitution or loss of information and / or other resources;
unauthorized disclosure of information;
interruption of services.
The main components of a security architecture are layers, planes, and security settings.

Security Architecture Components

X.805 considers three hierarchical security levels:

infrastructure security (means of transmitting information, hardware and software platforms and network elements);
security of services (consumed by subscribers of services);
Application security focuses on the security of network applications provided by service providers, as well as on the security of user applications that use network access.
Security planes define the protection of three types of network activity:

management - protection of the functions of control systems of network elements, data transmission tools, business support systems, data center;
control - protection of the effective transmission of information, services and applications over the network;
access (subscribers to the network).

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