DATA SECURITY

                          Data security  is the means of ensuring that data is kept safe from corruption and that access to it is suitably controlled.Thus data security helps to ensure privacy. It also helps in protecting personal data.

Data Security Technologies::

Full Disk Encryption

Full disk encryption refers to disk encryption technology that encrypts all of the data on the disk or a hard disk drive. Full disk encryption typically takes form in either software (see disk encryption software or hardware (see disk encryption hardware). Full Disk Encryption is often referred to as "FDE," and the combination of hardware and software full disk encryption is often referred to as "end-point full disk encryption," or "end-based full disk encryption.

Strong User Authentication

Single sign-on refers to authentication allowing users to log onto programs, files, folders, and computers once and without being requested to do so again. Single sign-on technology typically is adopted within a "strong user authentication" sense. That is, users are asked to sign-on with multiple factors of authentication. For example:
#password
#smartcard
#fingerprint
#One-time password

International Laws and Standards

                       In the UK, the Data Protection Act is used to ensure that personal data is accessible to those whom it concerns, and provides redress to individuals if there are inaccuracies. This is particularly important to ensure individuals are treated fairly, for example for credit checking purposes. The Data Protection Act states that only individuals and companies with legitimate and lawful reasons can process personal information and cannot be shared.

International Standards

The International Standard ISO/IEC 17799 covers data security under the topic of information security, and one of its cardinal principles is that all stored information, i.e. data, should be owned so that it is clear whose responsibility it is to protect and control access to that data.

The Trusted Computing Group is an organization that helps standardize computing security technologies.

NETWORK SECURITY

Network security consists of the provisions made in an underlying computer network infrastructure, policies adopted by the network administrator to protect the network and the network-accessible resources from unauthorized access and the effectiveness (or lack) of these measures combined together.

Comparison with computer security

Securing network infrastructure is like securing possible entry points of attacks on a country by deploying appropriate defense. Computer security is more like providing means to protect a single PC against outside intrusion. The former is better and practical to protect the civilians from getting exposed to the attacks. The preventive measures attempt to secure the access to individual computers--the network itself--thereby protecting the computers and other shared resources such as printers, network-attached storage connected by the network. Attacks could be stopped at their entry points before they spread. As opposed to this, in computer security the measures taken are focused on securing individual computer hosts. A computer host whose security is compromised is likely to infect other hosts connected to a potentially unsecured network. A computer host's security is vulnerable to users with higher access privileges to those hosts.

Attributes of a secure network

Network security starts from authenticating any user, most likely a username and a password. Once authenticated, a stateful firewall enforces access policies such as what services are allowed to be accessed by the network users. Though effective to prevent unauthorized access, this component fails to check potentially harmful contents such as computer worms being transmitted over the network. An intrusion prevention system (IPS)  helps detect and prevent such malware. IPS also monitors for suspicious network traffic for contents, volume and anomalies to protect the network from attacks such as denial of service. Communication between two hosts using the network could be encrypted to maintain privacy. Individual events occurring on the network could be tracked for audit purposes and for a later high level analysis.

Honeypots, essentially decoy network-accessible resources, could be deployed in a network as surveillance and early-warning tools. Techniques used by the attackers that attempt to compromise these decoy resources are studied during and after an attack to keep an eye on new exploitation techniques. Such analysis could be used to further tighten security of the actual network being protected by the honeypot.