INTL440 - Assignment#1 - Internet Communication - Patterson, Megan

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Feb 20, 2024

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1 Internet Communications: Functions, Applications, and Vulnerabilities Megan Patterson Cyber Warfare Course number: INTL440 25 December, 2022

2 Introduction Rapid technological advancements over the last 30 years laid the foundation for an entirely new form of criminal activity: cyber. Though the computer industry and interconnected networks (internet) are relatively young and certainly unique compared to historical forms of weaponry, society’s reliance upon this networking and information distribution capability is not lost on those who would wish to do harm. Cyber criminals pose a near-constant threat to anyone who communicates on the worldwide Internet. In order to arm an individual or organization against this threat, it is imperative to understand the fundamental building blocks which comprise networks. In turn, this serves to further determine the vulnerabilities inherent to various networks as well as software applications. Armed with this foundational knowledge, steps can then be taken to mitigate the risk posed by cyber criminals while utilizing the Internet. Networking Foundation The advent of computers coupled with connected systems paved the way for a global communication architecture and what is now commonly referred to as the Internet. The once simplistic design of interconnected computers has evolved into mass networking designs with the merging of computers and communications. Two computers able to exchange information via a multitude of means including fiber optics, satellites, or microwaves, are considered to be interconnected and form the most basic foundation of much larger networks. Expanding upon this, there are two models by which these networks are formed: client-server and peer- to-peer. The client-server model is popular for Web applications as centrally housed servers generate data responses to remote clients. The process of running programs enables communication between the client machine and the server machine with message packets over the network. Peer-to-peer communication, on the other hand, is a model in which

3 individuals communicate directly with others with no central database (Tanenbaum and Wetherall 2013). Connecting two or more networks requires translation across hardware and software achieved through gateways operating at various levels of protocol hierarchy. Additionally, between adjacent layers are interfaces which define the operations and services available to each layer. These interfaces make it easier to replace a layer with different protocols or implementations, a set of which is known as a network architecture. Individual machines do not need to have the same interfaces as long as they use the proper protocols for a system. Broadcast and point-to-points links connect individual pairs of machines as the two types of transmission technology. Where point-to-point is transmission between one sender and receiver, broadcast networks have communication channels shared by all machines on a network. Broadcasting allows for transmission to a subset of machines, and technology advancements such as RFID conceptualizes the real-world Internet of Things (IoT) (Tanenbaum and Wetherall 2013). The development of the IoT promoting interconnected smart devices is an evolutionary design of computer networking in which users are able to effortlessly scale their demands up or down. In conjunction with the IoT, cloud computing is an imperative building block to provide a wireless network database active across all devices in the form of a smart grid (Alam and Benaida 2018). Computer networks provide a wide range of communication mediums. Some examples include e-mail (peer-to-peer communication), Voice over IP (VoIP), desktop sharing to enable shared changes to an online working document, and even telemedicine such as remote patient monitoring. The growing e-commerce model of business has further driven advances across networks to enable convenience of manufacturing and shopping for various goods. Not to be confused with the Internet, the World Wide Web is a distributed system, representing a collection of independent computers that then appear as a single system, and is

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