Security in Distributed Systems

Home > Computer Science > Distributed Systems > Security in Distributed Systems

Common security threats and countermeasures for distributed systems.

Cryptography: The practice of securing communication and data with techniques such as encryption, decryption, and hashing.
Authentication: The process of verifying the identity of a user or entity before granting access to resources.
Authorization: The process of determining whether a user or entity has permission to access a certain resource or perform a certain action.
Access control: The system of rules and policies that restrict access to certain resources and ensure that only authorized users can access sensitive information or perform certain actions.
Firewalls: Software or hardware-based security systems that control incoming and outgoing network traffic.
Intrusion detection and prevention: The methods by which security systems monitor and respond to potential attacks or unauthorized access attempts.
Secure communication protocols: The set of rules and protocols governing secure communication between different systems, including SSL/TLS, HTTPS, SSH, and more.
Cybersecurity threats: An overview of common threats and attack methods that may be attempted against distributed systems, including phishing, malware, and social engineering.
Data privacy: An overview of regulations and best practices regarding the collection, storage, and handling of sensitive data.
Risk management: The process of identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks to the security and functioning of distributed systems.
Incident response: The process of responding to and mitigating the effects of a security breach or attack on a distributed system.
Digital forensics: The process of investigating and analyzing systems or data that have been compromised or tampered with.
Cloud security: Best practices for securing distributed systems that rely on cloud-based infrastructure or services.
IoT security: Best practices for securing distributed systems that rely on IoT devices, including sensors, wearables, and more.
Security testing: The methods and tools used to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses in security systems and distributed systems.
Authentication: This type of security ensures that only authorized users are granted access to the system or network.
Authorization: It defines a set of rules and permissions for what actions different users can perform within the system.
Integrity: This type of security ensures that data remains accurate and consistent by protecting against unauthorized modifications or alterations.
Confidentiality: This security mechanism provides confidentiality to protect sensitive information from unauthorized disclosure or theft.
Availability: This type of security ensures that resources and services are accessible and available to authorized users when they need them.
Non-repudiation: It provides a way to make sure that a message or transaction cannot be denied by the sender or receiver.
Access Control: This type of security ensures that only authorized users are granted access to specific resources, data and services.
Secure Communication: It provides a secure communication mechanism to ensure data privacy and security by protecting against eavesdropping or Hijacking attacks at the network level.
Firewalls: This security mechanism protects networks by filtering incoming and outgoing traffic to prevent unauthorized access or malicious activities.
Intrusion Detection/Prevention: IDS/IPS systems are designed to detect and prevent unauthorized access or malicious activities within the distributed network.
Encryption: This type of security mechanism ensures that the data is encrypted before transport or storage providing security and privacy to end-users or organizations.
Secure Storage: This type of security provides secure storage of sensitive data, files or media to prevent unauthorized access or tampering of data.
Application level security: It is the logical security layer implemented at the application level to secure application resources or services.
Distributed Tripwire: This is a security mechanism that monitors the state of different network components, notifying if any changes are made to any nodes within the distributed network.
Encrypted Communication: This security mechanism transfers data in a secure manner by using encryption algorithms, providing secure communication and transfer of sensitive information.
"A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another."
"Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems."
"The components of a distributed system interact with one another in order to achieve a common goal."
"Three significant challenges of distributed systems are: maintaining concurrency of components, overcoming the lack of a global clock, and managing the independent failure of components."
"When a component of one system fails, the entire system does not fail."
"Examples of distributed systems vary from SOA-based systems to massively multiplayer online games to peer-to-peer applications."
"A computer program that runs within a distributed system is called a distributed program."
"Distributed programming is the process of writing such programs."
"There are many different types of implementations for the message passing mechanism, including pure HTTP, RPC-like connectors, and message queues."
"Distributed computing also refers to the use of distributed systems to solve computational problems."
"In distributed computing, a problem is divided into many tasks."
"Each task is solved by one or more computers, which communicate with each other via message passing."
"The components of a distributed system... communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another."
"Maintaining concurrency of components" is a significant challenge in distributed systems.
"Overcoming the lack of a global clock" is a significant challenge in distributed systems.
"Managing the independent failure of components" is a significant challenge in distributed systems.
"When a component of one system fails, the entire system does not fail."
"Examples of distributed systems vary from SOA-based systems to massively multiplayer online games to peer-to-peer applications."
"A computer program that runs within a distributed system is called a distributed program."
"Computers in distributed computing... communicate with each other via message passing."