How will you ensure security of your Intranet?

The Intranet requires security because of :

• Hardware causes
• Software causes
• Information

Hardware can be stolen, tempared by frustrated employee, destruction of the resources. Whereas Software causes include deletion or theft of a program, corruption of a program, change in program code and thus making it malfunctioning, bugs in the software or virus attack.
Third component of the system liable to be attacked in data which is so important and crucial for an organization/company.
Security should be provided in order to make an Intranet functioning successfully and reliably. There are many ways through which Intranet can be made secured and reliable.

Those are :

• Certificates
• Firewalls
• Encryption/Decryption methods
• Multiple Level Security
• SOCKS

Certificates - Digital Certificates or Digital Signatures are used for securing e-mails money transactions. Certificates include a Public Key which is assigned to the users and is required to be sent when user wants to make any transaction.

Firewalls - Firewalls provide security by following :
-> Packet Filtering
-> Application Gateways for restricting applications
-> Proxy Servers

Encryption -
Public Key Solution - The Public Key Solutions involves a third party provider which provides key and checks for the authentication based upon the key.
Secured Sockets Layer (SSL) - It is used to secure the web server for authentication of the users who want to access the resource.
Virtual Private Network (VPN) - If an Intranet is extended between two geographically separated locations, VPN is used to secure Intranet data.

Multiple Level Security - Multiple level security involves more than one type of security mechanisms implemented to secure data. It can be combination of any two described above.

SOCKS - Different types of security can be implmented to secure data. Now these different types of security works at different layers of OSI reference model. SOCKS works at Transport Layer of OSI and it allows TCP application to access firewalls in a secured and controlled manner. SOCKS implementing requires a change to all existing client server based software so that all of them use the SOCKS library. This process is known as "Socksifying".