Group Project - Secure Communication over Internet

Hi everyone!

Through this post I(Ankit), Nikhil and Vikas would like to mention our experience at working for our project and its presentation.

First of all, I should not forget to thank our instructor Dr. Amarjeet for providing us with an opportunity to work upon something new and practical.

The aim of our project was to find ways of sharing information and data over networks such that the transfer is encrypted and the files are not accessible to any third party. We studied about different secure protocols such as https, ipsec, ssl, tls, ssh.

Networking via https is not at the choice of the user but can be done if the webserver has obtained a certificate for it and also either the browser should be pre installed with the certificate or else it can be installed later on.
For communicating via ssl/tls, the first condition is that the server should enable ssl and secondly the client also needs to obtain a server certificate. We could not demonstrate that because for this we were required to set up our own server.
Ssh uses public-key cryptography for authentification. The general method is that the client machine generates a key with private and public copy. The private copy is accessible only to the machine itself and the public key is sent to the machine with which the connection is to be established. Then any types of file transfer can take place between the machines.
Here is a good ssh tutorial - http://support.suso.com/supki/SSH_Tutorial_for_Linux .
Since ftp protocol was not a secure protocol, so sftp(secure ftp) was developed to overcome the shortcomings of ftp. It also utilizes the ssh encryption. Can be used both in windows as well as linux.

We could not find many utilities related to this topic but hope that the presentation and this post have been informative enough.
Also we should be thanking our IIIT-D server room administrators for their guidance and for giving us access to the servers.

Ankit (2010015)
Vikas (2010095)
Nikhil (2010054)

Leading the Lab Session

10 lab sessions passed and then we grabbed the chance to lead the 11th lab session. But we were disappointed to see very less students turning up for the lab and then leaving too early ('coz they have much more important work to do). We were to cover :

1.Video Editing (Which every one supposed they knew)

2.Photo Editing

3.SVN server

4.Remote Connection between computers.

Students were much interested in SVN servers and Remote connections. Nobody cared for Photo Editing/Video Editing. Overall it was good experience learning these things during training session on Saturday but equally bad were we in imparting the knowledge of the subject and we are not going to take blame for this.

Above all we are very thanks full to Dr. Amarjeet Singh Sir for providing us this opportunity.

Apoorv saini

2010020

Abhishek Gupta

2010004

Being A Leader

I along with Sahil Jain lead the lab on the topics Security in wireless routers, comparison of 802.11 a/b/g/n and configuring a wireless router.
The training session on saturday was a very bad experience. We came on time but as usual the lab leaders started late. Some of the topics like anti-virus had no content for the lab session. Even firewall was covered very vaguely.
But the lab hand-out was pretty well prepared and we could manage through.

The most interesting topic was WEP cracking. Everyone in the lab also enjoyed learning it. Another problem that came up during the lab hours was the inconvenience with the wireless router that did not work but thanks to our TA Arjun who came up with a solution and brought a wireless device. With the help of this device we were able to show WEP cracking and complete our lab successfully.

It was a very healthy experience and we look forward to lead such lab sessions again.

Sumit Aggarwal
(2009046)

Sahil Jain
(2010071)