Evolution of Network Security White Paper

The Internet was born in a military and academic environment. In this environment, the users were invariably trustworthy, and were
working collaboratively to make the technology operate for their mutual benefit. As a result of this, Internet Protocol (IP) and the
standard applications that operated over IP were not originally designed with security in mind.

Today, the inherently insecure Internet Protocol is still at the heart of Internet operation, along with a number of the long-standing
services that run over IP, such as:
■ Name lookups – Domain Name Service (DNS)
■ File transfers – File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
■ Email – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
■ Web browsing – Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
The core technologies that operate the Internet are no more secure now than they were back in the trusting days when the Internet
was first developed. However, now the Internet has grown to massive proportions and has millions of people connected to it, many of whom are highly untrustworthy. Online crime, mischief, espionage, extortion, and much more are ever increasing.
Therefore, Internet users need to take care to manage their data security needs. All manner of undesirables are roaming the
unguarded streets of the Internet, so there must be strong defenses in place between them, and precious data and services.
Over the years, as the value of data and online services has grown, and the threats they are under have grown, the networking
industry has developed a range of security devices and software to combat the threats.
This white paper provides a brief overview of how firewalls and related network security systems have evolved over the years, in order to:
■ explain why security solutions have evolved the way that they have
■ put some of the jargon into context
■ understand the current state of the art in network security
■ look some way into the future to consider what will come next