Details About Computer Hardware Security Devices

Computer security is all about the protection of all hardware & software devices used in your computer system.

Computer security helps to protect against threats. Anything that can cause disrupts the smooth functioning of the system can be termed as a threat. A virus, cybercrime, hardware failure, natural disaster, etc. are some of the many examples of threats.

According to Swarup Bhunia, “Hardware security primitives play an important role in ensuring trust, integrity, and authenticity of integrated circuits (ICs) and electronic systems.1′

Here are some Computer Hardware Security Devices that businesses need to protect against threats:

There are four types of firewalls:

• packet-filtering firewalls,
• stateful packet-filtering firewalls,
• proxy firewalls and
• web application firewalls.

• Proxy Server

Computer security has two forms. Software security and hardware security. Protecting software components of any system, be it stored data or in transmission, comes under software security.

Hardware security, on the other hand deals with safeguarding the hardware from threats.

Hardware security can be as simple and confining admittance to the people who are approved. In other words, different PC clients pay to have this help given by an Internet specialist co-op (ISP). Besides, having an external supplier can produce security dangers and can be problematic if the ISP stops the activity. These days most associations pick to build up an in-house ISP. Along these lines, the security of the corporate server is under direct control.

Nodes are either distribution systems or communication endpoints that connect devices to the network. The security measures mentioned above need to be implemented even for nodes as they are a crucial part of any network of computers.

The hub is a device present at the core of a network. In addition, it exchanges information between the connected computers. It behaves like a key to a network. A hub should be kept away from high traffic areas and in a secure room of IT infrastructure. However, this will help to restrict tampering.

Despite the prevalence of computer hackers, most businesses rely on the internet to track their financials, order and maintain inventory, conduct marketing, and PR campaigns, connect with customers, engage in social media, and perform other critical operations. Despite all this, even major tech giants face computer breaches and need to be vigilant at all times.

Small businesses might not have the right resources to have proper cybersecurity measures in place. Thus, they become easy targets for cybercriminals. Follow these tips to protect your devices and safeguard your sensitive data:

Use a firewall.

Windows and macOS have built-in firewalls software designed to create a barrier between your information and the outside world. Moreover, firewalls prevent unauthorized access to your business network and alert you to any intrusion attempts.

Make sure the firewall is enabled before you go online. Subsequently, you can also purchase a hardware firewall from companies such as Cisco, Sophos, or Fortinet, depending on your broadband router, which also has a built-in firewall that protects your network. If you have a larger business, you can purchase an additional business networking firewall.

Most businesses are unaware of hardware attacks and security breaches. Similarly, this includes network appliances, industrial control systems, and elements of communication infrastructure.

Here are some common hardware attacks:

• Manufacturing backdoors:

Manufacturing backdoors can allow unauthorized users to circumvent normal security measures and also gain root access to the hardware. Likewise, backdoors can then install malware or other malicious code.

• Eavesdropping:

The malicious actors gain access to protected memory without opening other hardware devices.

• Inducing faults:

Such kinds of attacks disrupt the normal behavior of a device. It can have knock-on effects as other hardware and software relying on the normal operation of the infected hardware then fail to function.

• Hardware modification:

In this, the modifications are aimed at tampering with a device’s normal functioning and overriding restrictions on its operation.

• Backdoor creation:

These are the hidden methods for bypassing normal computer authentication systems.

• Counterfeiting product assets:

This attack can produce extraordinary operations and allow malicious access to systems

List all the devices and their key features.

Firewalls:

There are four types of firewalls: packet-filtering firewalls, stateful packet-filtering firewalls, proxy firewalls, and web application firewalls.

Packet-filtering firewall

A packet-filtering firewall is a primary and simple type of network security firewall. Moreover, it has filters that compare incoming and outgoing packets against a standard set of rules to decide whether to allow them to pass through.

Also, the Internet protocols the packet contains are Layer 2 and Layer 3 packets include the type of protocol being used as part of their header structure.
These packets can be any of the following types:

• Normal data-carrying IP packet
• Message control packet (ICMP)
• Address resolution packet (ARP)
• Reverse Address Resolution Protocol (RARP)
• Boot-up Protocol (BOOTP)
• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)

Features:

• The main feature of packet-filtering firewalls is the speed at which the firewall operations are achieved because most of the work takes place at Layer 3 or below and complex application-level knowledge is not required.

Stateful packet-filtering firewall

Stateful packet-filtering techniques use a sophisticated approach, in addition, still retaining the basic abilities of packet-filtering firewalls.

The main thing is that they work at Layer 4 and the connection pairs usually consist of these four parameters:
Stateful inspection techniques employ a dynamic memory that stores the state tables of the incoming and established connections. Any time an external host requests a connection to your internal host, the connection parameters are written to the state tables. As with packet-filtering firewalls, similarly, you can create rules to define whether certain packets can pass through. For example, a firewall rule can require dropping packets that contain port numbers higher than 1023, but, as most servers respond on standard ports numbered from zero to 1023.

Features:

• It provides additional security, especially in connectionless protocols, such as User Datagram Protocol and Internet Control Message Protocol.

Proxy firewall

Proxy firewalls aim for the Application layer in the OSI model for their operations. Meanwhile, such proxies can be deployed in between a remote user (who might be on a public network such as the internet) and the dedicated server on the internet. All that the remote user discovers is the proxy, so he doesn’t know the identity of the server he is actually communicating with. Similarly, the server discovers only the proxy and doesn’t know the true user.

Feature:

• The main feature of application proxies is they offer some of the best security of all the firewall technologies.
• A proxy firewall can be an effective shielding and filtering mechanism between public networks.
• Lastly, this proxy system enables you to set a firewall to accept or reject packets based on addresses, port information, and  application information

Web application firewall (WAF)

Web application firewalls provide web applications security by applying a set of rules to an HTTP conversation. Because applications are online, they have to keep certain ports open to the internet. In other words, this means attackers can try specific website attacks against the application and the associated database, such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection.

Features:

• Proxy firewalls generally protect clients, & WAFs protect servers.
• Most importantly, another great feature of WAFs is that they detect distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in their early stages, absorb the volume of traffic and identify the source of the attack.

Servers:

Proxy server

Proxy servers act as negotiators for requests from client software seeking resources from other servers. Moreover, a client connects to the proxy server and requests some service the proxy server evaluates the request and then allows or denies it. Lastly, most proxy servers act as forwarding proxies and are used to retrieve data on behalf of the clients they serve.

A proxy server is accessible by any user on the internet, therefore it is an open proxy server. Certainly, a variation is a reverse proxy, also known as a surrogate. Furthermore, this is an internal-facing server used as a front-end to control (and protect) access to a server on a private network.

Features:

• Firstly, proxies can be transparent or non-transparent. As a result, a transparent proxy does not modify the request or response beyond the requirement for proxy authentication and identification; in other words, but, clients need not be aware of the existence of the proxy.
• Furthermore, a non-transparent proxy modifies the request or response in order to provide some added service to the user agent, such as group annotation services, media type transformation, protocol reduction, or anonymity filtering.
• Above all, they are usually useful for traffic filtering and performance improvement.

In conclusion, hardware security is concerned with delivering an IT infrastructure for secure software execution. In general, the role of hardware in protecting assets from malicious software has been described in detail. For security purposes, the hardware is an important thing to fight against various software attacks. This helps to protect all levels of the software stack, from the operating system to application software. These attacks mount through either functional or side-channel vulnerabilities. In this blog, we discussed various scenarios of attacks on hardware and possible countermeasures.

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