TCP/IP protocol suite is the most widely used communication protocol and has become the de facto standard for internet based communications. It is a set of robust protocols originally designed to provide reliable communication services that allow co-operating computers to share resources across networks. The networking of resources also brought in many potential threats to the network community like unauthorized access to private information, malicious break-in to other organizations’ systems, to make them unusable or unreliable, due to some inherent security problems in the underlying protocols as their development was based upon the concept of implicit trust between the communicating systems. Due to the design faults and faulty implementations of TCP / IP protocol suite several vulnerabilities have been reported. Different types of network based attacks have been identified which adopt the computer networks as transportation mechanism to carry out the intrusion or attack the communication system itself. Some of such attacks are sniffing, spoofing, denial of service, session hijacking, traffic redirection, authentication and routing attacks. Several tools and defence mechanisms have been developed to identify, analyse and mitigate such attacks. We describe some of these attacks against TCP/IP suite, analysis tools and various defence mechanisms.

Full text: IJEIR_788_Final.pdf