Date Posted: 9/10/2012 11:18:29 AM
Posted By: SimonMburu Membership Level: Silver Total Points: 838
Secure communication refers to a communication whereby only the recipient of the message understands the message even if there are intruders who may intercept, read and perform computations on whatever is being transmitted. The receiver is also sure that the message received was from a particular sender and that it has not been altered in transit.Below are some of the desirable properties of a secure communication.1. Confidentiality: Only the sender and the receiver should be able to understand the contents of the transmitted message. Because of intruders, i.e. hackers, the message maybe encrypted (its data disguised) so that the interceptor cannot understand the message. This aspect of confidentiality is probably the most commonly perceived meaning of the phrase "secure communication".2. Authentication: Both sender and receiver should be able to confirm the identity of the other party involved in the communication i.e. to confirm that the other party is indeed who or what they claim to be.3. Message integrity and nonrepudiation: Even if the sender and receiver are able to authenticate each other, they also want to ensure that the content of their communication is not altered, either maliciously or by accident during transmission. Therefore message integrity can be ensured by extensions to the checksumming techniques that we encounter in reliable transport and data link protocols.4. Availability and access control: The compelling need for network security has been made unbearable over the past several years by numerous denial-of-access attacks that have rendered a network host or other pieces of network infrastructure unusable by legitimate users. The notion of access control ensures that entities seeking to gain access to resources are allowed to do so only if they have the appropriate access rights and perform their accesses in a well-defined manner.
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