Chapter 13: Security Protocols
Overview
This chapter introduces the student technician to the security protocols commonly used in
today’s networks. Although it would be impractical to have student technicians setting up
security provisions for a network, there are many concepts that will lay the foundation for
later work. Students will not need to know any configuration parameters, nor the steps a
particular protocol takes to provide security. They will need to know, for instance, that
IPSec is considered an “end-to-end” security protocol that uses three different types of
keys, depending on the administrator’s available services and needs.
Teaching Suggestions
The Public Key Cryptography or PKI encryption is an interesting process to discuss in
class. I often draw multiple computers on the board—a couple of workstations, a server,
and a certificate server (Microsoft products contain all three options and is most suited
for example). Then we discuss what happens when someone wants to buy a product over
the Internet. This brings the concepts to the students in a very practical way (and drawing
keys is always fun.). You can also bring in SSL here.
It is not necessary to go too deeply into AH or ESP for the sake of the test. If the student
is familiar with the terms and knows they are a packet format for IPSec, that is enough.
The same holds true for the IPSec modes of operation.
The VPN section also lends itself well to board drawings. You can display a site-to-site
or client-to-site VPN. The students can then see how data is protected between the sender
and the receiver.
For L2TP and also Kerberos, it is not necessary to know each step in the process. Rather,
students must know under what circumstances each might be used. A chart might be
helpful for the sake of comparison.
The important item to remember with Kerberos centers around the fact that it is a
protocol that works “behind the scenes” within an operating system to validate access.
The release of NetWare 4.1 included three new features:
 NetWare Application Launcher (NAL)
 Support for thousands of connections per server
 The NWAdmin utility.
NetWare 4.1 was the first fully functional version of the NDS.