Chapter-1

1.0 Introduction

With the tremendous advancement of Internet, different aspects of it are achieving the highest peak of growth. An example of it is e-commerce. More and more computers get connected to the Internet, wireless devices and networks are booming and sooner or later, nearly every electronic device may have its own IP address. The complexity of networks is increasing, the software on devices gets more sophisticated and user friendly – interacting with other devices and people are a main issues. At the same time, the complexity of the involved software grows, life cycles are getting shorter and maintaining high quality is difficult. Most users want (or need) to have access to information from all over the world around the clock. Highly interconnected devices which have access to the global network are the consequence. As a result, privacy and security concerns are getting more important. In a word, information is money. There is a serious need to limit access to personal or confidential information – access controls are needed. Unfortunately most software is not bug free due to their complexity or carelessness of their inventors. Some bugs may have a serious impact on the access controls in place or may even open up some unintended backdoors. Security therefore is a hot topic and quite some effort is spent in securing services, systems and networks. On the internet, there is a silent war going on between the good and the bad guys – between the ones who are trying hard to keep information secured and the ones who are trying to get prohibited access to these information. Securing an information technology environment does not just consist of a bunch of actions which can be taken and then everything can be forgotten – there is no fire and forget solution - security is a never ending process. It is not very difficult to prevent these kinds