Question

3.         Can you explain some of the modern-day flaws associated with encryption? Why is encryption not as secure today as it was earlier in the century?

4.         Can you compare and contrast firewalls and proxy servers and their security functions?

Answer 1

3)

It’s not that it’s not as secure, it’s that

A) There is far more encryption in use!

B) There is far more effort going into identifying cryptographic weaknesses in commonly used algorithms, and in exploiting them when they’re found, since there is a tremendous amount of commerce taking place on the internet.

The key to most encryption flaws has been that there’s something about the algorithm in question that unintentionally makes the space of possible keys much smaller and less random than it should be if enough of the encrypted text can be collected and analyzed, which allows the keys to be subjected to a brute force attack in a reasonable amount of time by eliminating large swaths of the possibilities.

To date, no such flaws have been found in the AES standard.

4)

Firewalls and proxy servers alike are used to protect private serversand other networks for clients. Firewalls filter the packets ofinformation and prevent certain ones from entering in. Proxy serversare servers than handle the communication coming to and from theinternet. Both require some sort of user validation.