In computing , Internet Protocol Security ( IPsec ) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts packets of data to provide secure encrypted communication between two computers over an Internet Protocol network. It is used in virtual private networks (VPNs).
82-516: In computer networks , a reverse DNS lookup or reverse DNS resolution ( rDNS ) is the querying technique of the Domain Name System (DNS) to determine the domain name associated with an IP address – the reverse of the usual "forward" DNS lookup of an IP address from a domain name. The process of reverse resolving of an IP address uses PTR records . rDNS involves searching domain name registry and registrar tables. The reverse DNS database of
164-867: A certificate authority , this can be used for IPsec authentication. The security associations of IPsec are established using the Internet Security Association and Key Management Protocol (ISAKMP). ISAKMP is implemented by manual configuration with pre-shared secrets, Internet Key Exchange (IKE and IKEv2), Kerberized Internet Negotiation of Keys (KINK), and the use of IPSECKEY DNS records . RFC 5386 defines Better-Than-Nothing Security (BTNS) as an unauthenticated mode of IPsec using an extended IKE protocol. C. Meadows, C. Cremers, and others have used formal methods to identify various anomalies which exist in IKEv1 and also in IKEv2. In order to decide what protection
246-737: A protocol stack , often constructed per the OSI model, communications functions are divided up into protocol layers, where each layer leverages the services of the layer below it until the lowest layer controls the hardware that sends information across the media. The use of protocol layering is ubiquitous across the field of computer networking. An important example of a protocol stack is HTTP (the World Wide Web protocol) running over TCP over IP (the Internet protocols) over IEEE 802.11 (the Wi-Fi protocol). This stack
328-499: A diverse set of networking capabilities. The protocols have a flat addressing scheme. They operate mostly at layers 1 and 2 of the OSI model. For example, MAC bridging ( IEEE 802.1D ) deals with the routing of Ethernet packets using a Spanning Tree Protocol . IEEE 802.1Q describes VLANs , and IEEE 802.1X defines a port-based network access control protocol, which forms the basis for the authentication mechanisms used in VLANs (but it
410-580: A few incompatible engineering details, although they were conceptually identical. In addition, a mutual authentication and key exchange protocol Internet Key Exchange (IKE) was defined to create and manage security associations. In December 2005, new standards were defined in RFC 4301 and RFC 4309 which are largely a superset of the previous editions with a second version of the Internet Key Exchange standard IKEv2 . These third-generation documents standardized
492-829: A hash, so they cannot be modified in any way, for example by translating the port numbers. A means to encapsulate IPsec messages for NAT traversal {NAT-T} has been defined by RFC documents describing the NAT-T mechanism. In tunnel mode, the entire IP packet is encrypted and authenticated. It is then encapsulated into a new IP packet with a new IP header. Tunnel mode is used to create virtual private networks for network-to-network communications (e.g. between routers to link sites), host-to-network communications (e.g. remote user access) and host-to-host communications (e.g. private chat). Tunnel mode supports NAT traversal. Cryptographic algorithms defined for use with IPsec include: Refer to RFC 8221 for details. The IPsec can be implemented in
574-518: A host-to-host transport mode, as well as in a network tunneling mode. In transport mode, only the payload of the IP packet is usually encrypted or authenticated. The routing is intact, since the IP header is neither modified nor encrypted; however, when the authentication header is used, the IP addresses cannot be modified by network address translation , as this always invalidates the hash value . The transport and application layers are always secured by
656-440: A large, congested network into an aggregation of smaller, more efficient networks. A router is an internetworking device that forwards packets between networks by processing the addressing or routing information included in the packet. The routing information is often processed in conjunction with the routing table . A router uses its routing table to determine where to forward packets and does not require broadcasting packets which
738-548: A member of the IPsec protocol suite. It provides origin authenticity through source authentication , data integrity through hash functions and confidentiality through encryption protection for IP packets . ESP also supports encryption -only and authentication -only configurations, but using encryption without authentication is strongly discouraged because it is insecure. Unlike Authentication Header (AH) , ESP in transport mode does not provide integrity and authentication for
820-440: A multi-port bridge. Switches normally have numerous ports, facilitating a star topology for devices, and for cascading additional switches. Bridges and switches operate at the data link layer (layer 2) of the OSI model and bridge traffic between two or more network segments to form a single local network. Both are devices that forward frames of data between ports based on the destination MAC address in each frame. They learn
902-664: A network encryption device in 1988. The work was openly published from about 1988 by NIST and, of these, Security Protocol at Layer 3 (SP3) would eventually morph into the ISO standard Network Layer Security Protocol (NLSP). In 1992, the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) was funded by DARPA CSTO to implement IPv6 and to research and implement IP encryption in 4.4 BSD , supporting both SPARC and x86 CPU architectures. DARPA made its implementation freely available via MIT. Under NRL's DARPA -funded research effort, NRL developed
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#1732869428149984-449: A pair of hosts ( host-to-host ), between a pair of security gateways ( network-to-network ), or between a security gateway and a host ( network-to-host ). IPsec uses cryptographic security services to protect communications over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It supports network-level peer authentication, data origin authentication , data integrity , data confidentiality ( encryption ), and protection from replay attacks . Starting in
1066-453: A repeater hub assists with collision detection and fault isolation for the network. Hubs and repeaters in LANs have been largely obsoleted by modern network switches. Network bridges and network switches are distinct from a hub in that they only forward frames to the ports involved in the communication whereas a hub forwards to all ports. Bridges only have two ports but a switch can be thought of as
1148-404: A security association is provided for the group, and is duplicated across all authorized receivers of the group. There may be more than one security association for a group, using different SPIs, thereby allowing multiple levels and sets of security within a group. Indeed, each sender can have multiple security associations, allowing authentication, since a receiver can only know that someone knowing
1230-658: A security extension for SIPP. This ESP was originally derived from the US Department of Defense SP3D protocol, rather than being derived from the ISO Network-Layer Security Protocol (NLSP). The SP3D protocol specification was published by NIST in the late 1980s, but designed by the Secure Data Network System project of the US Department of Defense . Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) is
1312-418: A single failure can cause the network to fail entirely. In general, the more interconnections there are, the more robust the network is; but the more expensive it is to install. Therefore, most network diagrams are arranged by their network topology which is the map of logical interconnections of network hosts. Common topologies are: The physical layout of the nodes in a network may not necessarily reflect
1394-409: A so-called bump-in-the-wire (BITW) implementation of IPsec is possible. When IPsec is implemented in the kernel , the key management and ISAKMP / IKE negotiation is carried out from user space. The NRL-developed and openly specified "PF_KEY Key Management API, Version 2" is often used to enable the application-space key management application to update the IPsec security associations stored within
1476-403: A standard voice telephone line. Modems are still commonly used for telephone lines, using a digital subscriber line technology and cable television systems using DOCSIS technology. A firewall is a network device or software for controlling network security and access rules. Firewalls are inserted in connections between secure internal networks and potentially insecure external networks such as
1558-877: A transmission medium. Power line communication uses a building's power cabling to transmit data. The following classes of wired technologies are used in computer networking. Network connections can be established wirelessly using radio or other electromagnetic means of communication. The last two cases have a large round-trip delay time , which gives slow two-way communication but does not prevent sending large amounts of information (they can have high throughput). Apart from any physical transmission media, networks are built from additional basic system building blocks, such as network interface controllers , repeaters , hubs , bridges , switches , routers , modems, and firewalls . Any particular piece of equipment will frequently contain multiple building blocks and so may perform multiple functions. A network interface controller (NIC)
1640-406: A variety of network topologies . The nodes of a computer network can include personal computers , servers , networking hardware , or other specialized or general-purpose hosts . They are identified by network addresses and may have hostnames . Hostnames serve as memorable labels for the nodes and are rarely changed after initial assignment. Network addresses serve for locating and identifying
1722-495: A variety of different sources, primarily to support circuit-switched digital telephony . However, due to its protocol neutrality and transport-oriented features, SONET/SDH also was the obvious choice for transporting Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) frames. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a switching technique for telecommunication networks. It uses asynchronous time-division multiplexing and encodes data into small, fixed-sized cells . This differs from other protocols such as
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#17328694281491804-652: A virtual system of links that run on top of the Internet . Overlay networks have been used since the early days of networking, back when computers were connected via telephone lines using modems, even before data networks were developed. The most striking example of an overlay network is the Internet itself. The Internet itself was initially built as an overlay on the telephone network . Even today, each Internet node can communicate with virtually any other through an underlying mesh of sub-networks of wildly different topologies and technologies. Address resolution and routing are
1886-519: Is computer hardware that connects the computer to the network media and has the ability to process low-level network information. For example, the NIC may have a connector for plugging in a cable, or an aerial for wireless transmission and reception, and the associated circuitry. In Ethernet networks, each NIC has a unique Media Access Control (MAC) address —usually stored in the controller's permanent memory. To avoid address conflicts between network devices,
1968-407: Is a method of detecting a dead Internet Key Exchange (IKE) peer. The method uses IPsec traffic patterns to minimize the number of messages required to confirm the availability of a peer. DPD is used to reclaim the lost resources in case a peer is found dead and it is also used to perform IKE peer failover. UDP keepalive is an alternative to DPD. The IPsec protocols AH and ESP can be implemented in
2050-422: Is a virtual network that is built on top of another network. Nodes in the overlay network are connected by virtual or logical links. Each link corresponds to a path, perhaps through many physical links, in the underlying network. The topology of the overlay network may (and often does) differ from that of the underlying one. For example, many peer-to-peer networks are overlay networks. They are organized as nodes of
2132-553: Is also found in WLANs ) – it is what the home user sees when the user has to enter a "wireless access key". Ethernet is a family of technologies used in wired LANs. It is described by a set of standards together called IEEE 802.3 published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Wireless LAN based on the IEEE 802.11 standards, also widely known as WLAN or WiFi, is probably
2214-403: Is also used for both hosts and gateways. However, when retrofitting IPsec the encapsulation of IP packets may cause problems for the automatic path MTU discovery , where the maximum transmission unit (MTU) size on the network path between two IP hosts is established. If a host or gateway has a separate cryptoprocessor , which is common in the military and can also be found in commercial systems,
2296-478: Is an electronic device that receives a network signal , cleans it of unnecessary noise and regenerates it. The signal is retransmitted at a higher power level, or to the other side of obstruction so that the signal can cover longer distances without degradation. In most twisted-pair Ethernet configurations, repeaters are required for cable that runs longer than 100 meters. With fiber optics, repeaters can be tens or even hundreds of kilometers apart. Repeaters work on
2378-459: Is constructed and interpreted: The IPsec protocols use a security association , where the communicating parties establish shared security attributes such as algorithms and keys. As such, IPsec provides a range of options once it has been determined whether AH or ESP is used. Before exchanging data, the two hosts agree on which symmetric encryption algorithm is used to encrypt the IP packet, for example AES or ChaCha20 , and which hash function
2460-412: Is inefficient for very big networks. Modems (modulator-demodulator) are used to connect network nodes via wire not originally designed for digital network traffic, or for wireless. To do this one or more carrier signals are modulated by the digital signal to produce an analog signal that can be tailored to give the required properties for transmission. Early modems modulated audio signals sent over
2542-404: Is not sending packets, the link can be filled with packets from other users, and so the cost can be shared, with relatively little interference, provided the link is not overused. Often the route a packet needs to take through a network is not immediately available. In that case, the packet is queued and waits until a link is free. The physical link technologies of packet networks typically limit
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2624-417: Is the process of selecting network paths to carry network traffic. Routing is performed for many kinds of networks, including circuit switching networks and packet switched networks. IPsec IPsec includes protocols for establishing mutual authentication between agents at the beginning of a session and negotiation of cryptographic keys to use during the session. IPsec can protect data flows between
2706-510: Is to be provided for an outgoing packet, IPsec uses the Security Parameter Index (SPI), an index to the security association database (SADB), along with the destination address in a packet header, which together uniquely identifies a security association for that packet. A similar procedure is performed for an incoming packet, where IPsec gathers decryption and verification keys from the security association database. For IP multicast
2788-459: Is used between the wireless router and the home user's personal computer when the user is surfing the web. There are many communication protocols, a few of which are described below. The Internet protocol suite , also called TCP/IP, is the foundation of all modern networking. It offers connection-less and connection-oriented services over an inherently unreliable network traversed by datagram transmission using Internet protocol (IP). At its core,
2870-405: Is used to ensure the integrity of the data, such as BLAKE2 or SHA256 . These parameters are agreed for the particular session, for which a lifetime must be agreed and a session key . The algorithm for authentication is also agreed before the data transfer takes place and IPsec supports a range of methods. Authentication is possible through pre-shared key , where a symmetric key is already in
2952-505: The Bullrun program. There are allegations that IPsec was a targeted encryption system. The OpenBSD IPsec stack came later on and also was widely copied. In a letter which OpenBSD lead developer Theo de Raadt received on 11 Dec 2010 from Gregory Perry, it is alleged that Jason Wright and others, working for the FBI, inserted "a number of backdoors and side channel key leaking mechanisms" into
3034-655: The IETF standards-track specifications (RFC 1825 through RFC 1827) for IPsec. NRL's IPsec implementation was described in their paper in the 1996 USENIX Conference Proceedings. NRL's open-source IPsec implementation was made available online by MIT and became the basis for most initial commercial implementations. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) formed the IP Security Working Group in 1992 to standardize openly specified security extensions to IP, called IPsec . The NRL developed standards were published by
3116-457: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) maintains and administers MAC address uniqueness. The size of an Ethernet MAC address is six octets . The three most significant octets are reserved to identify NIC manufacturers. These manufacturers, using only their assigned prefixes, uniquely assign the three least-significant octets of every Ethernet interface they produce. A repeater
3198-529: The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) version 2. Authentication Header (AH) is a member of the IPsec protocol suite. AH ensures connectionless integrity by using a hash function and a secret shared key in the AH algorithm. AH also guarantees the data origin by authenticating IP packets . Optionally a sequence number can protect the IPsec packet's contents against replay attacks , using
3280-470: The World Wide Web , digital video and audio , shared use of application and storage servers , printers and fax machines , and use of email and instant messaging applications. Computer networking may be considered a branch of computer science , computer engineering , and telecommunications , since it relies on the theoretical and practical application of the related disciplines. Computer networking
3362-528: The application layer , IPsec can automatically secure applications at the internet layer . IPsec is an open standard as a part of the IPv4 suite and uses the following protocols to perform various functions: The Security Authentication Header (AH) was developed at the US Naval Research Laboratory in the early 1990s and is derived in part from previous IETF standards' work for authentication of
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3444-583: The sliding window technique and discarding old packets. AH operates directly on top of IP, using IP protocol number 51 . The following AH packet diagram shows how an AH packet is constructed and interpreted: The IP Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) was developed at the Naval Research Laboratory starting in 1992 as part of a DARPA -sponsored research project, and was openly published by IETF SIPP Working Group drafted in December 1993 as
3526-414: The 32-bit IPv4 address into four octets and converting each octet into a decimal number. These decimal numbers are then concatenated in the order: least significant octet first (leftmost), to most significant octet last (rightmost). It is important to note that this is the reverse order to the usual dotted-decimal convention for writing IPv4 addresses in textual form. For example, to do a reverse lookup of
3608-507: The IETF as RFC 1825 through RFC 1827. The initial IPv4 suite was developed with few security provisions. As a part of the IPv4 enhancement, IPsec is a layer 3 OSI model or internet layer end-to-end security scheme. In contrast, while some other Internet security systems in widespread use operate above the network layer , such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) that operates above the transport layer and Secure Shell (SSH) that operates at
3690-559: The IP address 8.8.4.4 the PTR record for the domain name 4.4.8.8.in-addr.arpa would be looked up, and found to point to dns.google . If the A record for dns.google in turn pointed back to 8.8.4.4 then it would be said to be forward-confirmed . Historically, Internet registries and Internet service providers allocated IP addresses in blocks of 256 (for Class C) or larger octet-based blocks for classes B and A. By definition, each block fell upon an octet boundary. The structure of
3772-491: The IP stack of an operating system . This method of implementation is done for hosts and security gateways. Various IPsec capable IP stacks are available from companies, such as HP or IBM. An alternative is so called bump-in-the-stack (BITS) implementation, where the operating system source code does not have to be modified. Here IPsec is installed between the IP stack and the network drivers . This way operating systems can be retrofitted with IPsec. This method of implementation
3854-401: The Internet is rooted in the .arpa top-level domain. Although the informational RFC 1912 (Section 2.1) recommends that "every Internet-reachable host should have a name" and that "for every IP address, there should be a matching PTR record," it is not an Internet Standard requirement, and not all IP addresses have a reverse entry. The modern "reverse DNS lookup" should not be confused with
3936-440: The Internet protocol suite or Ethernet that use variable-sized packets or frames . ATM has similarities with both circuit and packet switched networking. This makes it a good choice for a network that must handle both traditional high-throughput data traffic, and real-time, low-latency content such as voice and video. ATM uses a connection-oriented model in which a virtual circuit must be established between two endpoints before
4018-574: The Internet. Firewalls are typically configured to reject access requests from unrecognized sources while allowing actions from recognized ones. The vital role firewalls play in network security grows in parallel with the constant increase in cyber attacks . A communication protocol is a set of rules for exchanging information over a network. Communication protocols have various characteristics. They may be connection-oriented or connectionless , they may use circuit mode or packet switching, and they may use hierarchical addressing or flat addressing. In
4100-576: The NSA compromised IPsec VPNs by undermining the Diffie-Hellman algorithm used in the key exchange. In their paper, they allege the NSA specially built a computing cluster to precompute multiplicative subgroups for specific primes and generators, such as for the second Oakley group defined in RFC 2409. As of May 2015, 90% of addressable IPsec VPNs supported the second Oakley group as part of IKE. If an organization were to precompute this group, they could derive
4182-500: The OpenBSD crypto code. In the forwarded email from 2010, Theo de Raadt did not at first express an official position on the validity of the claims, apart from the implicit endorsement from forwarding the email. Jason Wright's response to the allegations: "Every urban legend is made more real by the inclusion of real names, dates, and times. Gregory Perry's email falls into this category. ... I will state clearly that I did not add backdoors to
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#17328694281494264-579: The OpenBSD operating system or the OpenBSD Cryptographic Framework (OCF)." Some days later, de Raadt commented that "I believe that NETSEC was probably contracted to write backdoors as alleged. ... If those were written, I don't believe they made it into our tree." This was published before the Snowden leaks. An alternative explanation put forward by the authors of the Logjam attack suggests that
4346-599: The abbreviation of IPsec to uppercase "IP" and lowercase "sec". "ESP" generally refers to RFC 4303, which is the most recent version of the specification. Since mid-2008, an IPsec Maintenance and Extensions (ipsecme) working group is active at the IETF. In 2013, as part of Snowden leaks , it was revealed that the US National Security Agency had been actively working to "Insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, IT systems, networks, and endpoint communications devices used by targets" as part of
4428-627: The actual data exchange begins. ATM still plays a role in the last mile , which is the connection between an Internet service provider and the home user. There are a number of different digital cellular standards, including: Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), cdmaOne , CDMA2000 , Evolution-Data Optimized (EV-DO), Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT), Digital AMPS (IS-136/TDMA), and Integrated Digital Enhanced Network (iDEN). Routing
4510-468: The association of physical ports to MAC addresses by examining the source addresses of received frames and only forward the frame when necessary. If an unknown destination MAC is targeted, the device broadcasts the request to all ports except the source, and discovers the location from the reply. Bridges and switches divide the network's collision domain but maintain a single broadcast domain. Network segmentation through bridging and switching helps break down
4592-601: The early 1970s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency sponsored a series of experimental ARPANET encryption devices , at first for native ARPANET packet encryption and subsequently for TCP/IP packet encryption; some of these were certified and fielded. From 1986 to 1991, the NSA sponsored the development of security protocols for the Internet under its Secure Data Network Systems (SDNS) program. This brought together various vendors including Motorola who produced
4674-453: The entire IP packet . However, in tunnel mode , where the entire original IP packet is encapsulated with a new packet header added, ESP protection is afforded to the whole inner IP packet (including the inner header) while the outer header (including any outer IPv4 options or IPv6 extension headers) remains unprotected. ESP operates directly on top of IP, using IP protocol number 50. The following ESP packet diagram shows how an ESP packet
4756-408: The kernel-space IPsec implementation. Existing IPsec implementations usually include ESP, AH, and IKE version 2. Existing IPsec implementations on Unix-like operating systems , for example, Solaris or Linux , usually include PF_KEY version 2. Embedded IPsec can be used to ensure the secure communication among applications running over constrained resource systems with a small overhead. IPsec
4838-533: The keys being exchanged and decrypt traffic without inserting any software backdoors. A second alternative explanation that was put forward was that the Equation Group used zero-day exploits against several manufacturers' VPN equipment which were validated by Kaspersky Lab as being tied to the Equation Group and validated by those manufacturers as being real exploits, some of which were zero-day exploits at
4920-470: The keys sent the data. Note that the relevant standard does not describe how the association is chosen and duplicated across the group; it is assumed that a responsible party will have made the choice. To ensure that the connection between two endpoints has not been interrupted, endpoints exchange keepalive messages at regular intervals, which can also be used to automatically reestablish a tunnel lost due to connection interruption. Dead Peer Detection (DPD)
5002-665: The literature as the physical medium ) used to link devices to form a computer network include electrical cable , optical fiber , and free space. In the OSI model , the software to handle the media is defined at layers 1 and 2 — the physical layer and the data link layer. A widely adopted family that uses copper and fiber media in local area network (LAN) technology are collectively known as Ethernet. The media and protocol standards that enable communication between networked devices over Ethernet are defined by IEEE 802.3 . Wireless LAN standards use radio waves , others use infrared signals as
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#17328694281495084-665: The means that allow mapping of a fully connected IP overlay network to its underlying network. Another example of an overlay network is a distributed hash table , which maps keys to nodes in the network. In this case, the underlying network is an IP network, and the overlay network is a table (actually a map ) indexed by keys. Overlay networks have also been proposed as a way to improve Internet routing, such as through quality of service guarantees achieve higher-quality streaming media . Previous proposals such as IntServ , DiffServ , and IP multicast have not seen wide acceptance largely because they require modification of all routers in
5166-415: The most well-known member of the IEEE 802 protocol family for home users today. IEEE 802.11 shares many properties with wired Ethernet. Synchronous optical networking (SONET) and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) are standardized multiplexing protocols that transfer multiple digital bit streams over optical fiber using lasers. They were originally designed to transport circuit mode communications from
5248-445: The name server knows . Since no name server knows about all of the domain namespace, the response can never be assumed to be complete. Thus inverse queries are primarily useful for database management and debugging activities. Inverse queries are not an acceptable method of mapping host addresses to host names; use the in-addr.arpa domain instead. The IQUERY message type was always "optional" and "never achieved widespread use"; it
5330-412: The network needs to deliver the user data, for example, source and destination network addresses , error detection codes, and sequencing information. Typically, control information is found in packet headers and trailers , with payload data in between. With packets, the bandwidth of the transmission medium can be better shared among users than if the network were circuit switched . When one user
5412-420: The network topology. As an example, with FDDI , the network topology is a ring, but the physical topology is often a star, because all neighboring connections can be routed via a central physical location. Physical layout is not completely irrelevant, however, as common ducting and equipment locations can represent single points of failure due to issues like fires, power failures and flooding. An overlay network
5494-729: The network. On the other hand, an overlay network can be incrementally deployed on end-hosts running the overlay protocol software, without cooperation from Internet service providers . The overlay network has no control over how packets are routed in the underlying network between two overlay nodes, but it can control, for example, the sequence of overlay nodes that a message traverses before it reaches its destination . For example, Akamai Technologies manages an overlay network that provides reliable, efficient content delivery (a kind of multicast ). Academic research includes end system multicast, resilient routing and quality of service studies, among others. The transmission media (often referred to in
5576-486: The nodes by communication protocols such as the Internet Protocol . Computer networks may be classified by many criteria, including the transmission medium used to carry signals, bandwidth , communications protocols to organize network traffic , the network size, the topology, traffic control mechanisms, and organizational intent. Computer networks support many applications and services , such as access to
5658-457: The now-obsolete "inverse query" (IQUERY) mechanism specified in RFC 1035 : Inverse queries take the form of a single resource record (RR) in the answer section of the message, with an empty question section. The owner name of the query RR and its time to live (TTL) are not significant. The response carries questions in the question section which identify all names possessing the query RR which
5740-477: The number. Multiple PTR records are used, for example, when a web server supports many virtual hosts — i.e. multiple hostnames then resolve to a single address, and multiple hostnames will be returned for a PTR lookup for that shared address. However, DNS lookups typically occur over UDP, and since UDP has a limited message size, in extreme cases, multiple PTRs could cause a DNS response to exceed those UDP limits. Record types other than PTR records may also appear in
5822-515: The physical layer of the OSI model but still require a small amount of time to regenerate the signal. This can cause a propagation delay that affects network performance and may affect proper function. As a result, many network architectures limit the number of repeaters used in a network, e.g., the Ethernet 5-4-3 rule . An Ethernet repeater with multiple ports is known as an Ethernet hub . In addition to reconditioning and distributing network signals,
5904-412: The possession of both hosts, and the hosts send each other hashes of the shared key to prove that they are in possession of the same key. IPsec also supports public key encryption , where each host has a public and a private key, they exchange their public keys and each host sends the other a nonce encrypted with the other host's public key. Alternatively if both hosts hold a public key certificate from
5986-456: The protocol suite defines the addressing, identification, and routing specifications for Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) and for IPv6 , the next generation of the protocol with a much enlarged addressing capability. The Internet protocol suite is the defining set of protocols for the Internet. IEEE 802 is a family of IEEE standards dealing with local area networks and metropolitan area networks. The complete IEEE 802 protocol suite provides
6068-489: The reverse DNS domain was based on this definition. However, with the introduction of Classless Inter-Domain Routing , IP addresses were allocated in much smaller blocks, and hence the original design of pointer records was impractical, since autonomy of administration of smaller blocks could not be granted. RFC 2317 devised a methodology to address this problem by using CNAME records . Reverse DNS lookups for IPv6 addresses use
6150-452: The reverse DNS include: Computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes . Computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are made up of telecommunication network technologies based on physically wired, optical , and wireless radio-frequency methods that may be arranged in
6232-470: The reverse DNS tree. For example, encryption keys may be placed there for IPsec , SSH and IKE . DNS-Based Service Discovery uses specially-named records in the reverse DNS tree to provide hints to clients about subnet-specific service discovery domains. Less standardized usages include comments placed in TXT records and LOC records to identify the geophysical location of an IP address. The most common uses of
6314-515: The sharing of files and information, giving authorized users access to data stored on other computers. Distributed computing leverages resources from multiple computers across a network to perform tasks collaboratively. Most modern computer networks use protocols based on packet-mode transmission. A network packet is a formatted unit of data carried by a packet-switched network . Packets consist of two types of data: control information and user data (payload). The control information provides data
6396-493: The size of packets to a certain maximum transmission unit (MTU). A longer message may be fragmented before it is transferred and once the packets arrive, they are reassembled to construct the original message. The physical or geographic locations of network nodes and links generally have relatively little effect on a network, but the topology of interconnections of a network can significantly affect its throughput and reliability. With many technologies, such as bus or star networks,
6478-497: The special domain ip6.arpa (previously ip6.int ). An IPv6 address appears as a name in this domain as a sequence of nibbles in reverse order, represented as hexadecimal digits as subdomains. For example, the pointer domain name corresponding to the IPv6 address 2001:db8::567:89ab is b.a.9.8.7.6.5.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.8.b.d.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa . While most rDNS entries only have one PTR record, DNS does not restrict
6560-400: Was "permanently retired" in 2002 with the adoption of RFC 3425 . Reverse DNS lookups for IPv4 addresses use the special domain in-addr.arpa . In this domain, an IPv4 address is represented as a concatenated sequence of four decimal numbers, separated by dots, to which is appended the second level domain suffix .in-addr.arpa . The four decimal numbers are obtained by splitting
6642-462: Was developed in conjunction with IPv6 and was originally required to be supported by all standards-compliant implementations of IPv6 before RFC 6434 made it only a recommendation. IPsec is also optional for IPv4 implementations. IPsec is most commonly used to secure IPv4 traffic. IPsec protocols were originally defined in RFC 1825 through RFC 1829, which were published in 1995. In 1998, these documents were superseded by RFC 2401 and RFC 2412 with
6724-462: Was influenced by a wide array of technological developments and historical milestones. Computer networks enhance how users communicate with each other by using various electronic methods like email, instant messaging, online chat, voice and video calls, and video conferencing. Networks also enable the sharing of computing resources. For example, a user can print a document on a shared printer or use shared storage devices. Additionally, networks allow for
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