Taming the Hacking Storm

Chapter 11Trust Assurance Service

Trust plays a significant role in whether people want to use the Internet or not. Part of that trust is in identifying who is who when communicating across a network. Identity is base and essential to network communications. Most computers have multiple “identifiers” to communicate over a network.

Nearly every computer has an Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) service (to resolve local IP addresses to physical addresses), a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) client (to get assigned an IP Address), a Domain Naming Service (DNS) client (to convert domain names to IP addresses), Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service, and NetBIOS resolution client. These are all the clients and protocols needed to make the average computer device connect over a network and work by default. Even if you tell your local firewall to block all connections by default, it will usually still allow these services to send and answer essential network requests. If it didn’t, your computer would not work over the network, leaving the average user very confused about what is going on.

But we don’t have a default Internet security service to ask and determine “Can I trust this connection or content I’m about to interact with?” Nope, all our computers will just as readily connect to a rogue site and interact with malicious content just as readily as it will interact with legitimate sites and content. The computer has no way of knowing if what it is connecting to or displaying ...