CST 311

This week was short, due to the final and the week ending on Saturday. Just as we studied the first half of Chapter 8 in Week 4, we studied the second half this week. As we saw before, this chapter focuses on security. We looked at SSL as it is used to secure TCP at … Read more

In this week’s lecture material, we studied the link layer. This is the layer of the network which bridges software and hardware. We learned about hardware addresses such as MAC addresses and how they are assigned IP addresses so that they can communicate on the internet. This is accomplished using ARP, or, the Address Resolution … Read more

We continued our study of the network layer this week. Specifically, we looked at the control plane, which is the part of the network layer that governs the way in which packets are sent at a network-wide level, rather than a router-to-router level. This included an overview of different types of routing algorithms used to … Read more

This week, we began covering the Network Layer of networking. Specifically, we covered the data plane, which controls the way in which packets find their way from source to destination on a per-router basis. We discovered the logical components of a router, such as forwarding. We summarized the Internet Protocol, including IPv4 and IPv6. We … Read more

This week focused on security. Using the example of Bob, Alice, and Trudy, we had an overview of cryptography. We saw the difference between symmetric and public key encryption, and the importance of having public/private key pairs. We also saw the importance of authentication, in order to combat man-in-the-middle attacks.

This week, we covered the Transport Layer of networking. The transport layer refers to the services which communicate to the application layer processes before they are passed on to the network layer. We focused on the two main transport protocols: TCP and UDP. UDP is a connection-less protocol which provides “best effort” communication, which is … Read more

This week, we learned about the application layer of networks. This is the “Top Layer” of the top-down approach to studying networks. The application layer consists of internet applications, such as E-mail, file sharing, and video streaming. We learned about HTTP, which is the protocol that web browsers use to exchange HTML web pages. We … Read more

This week., we learned at a high level some basic concepts about networking and the internet. We learned about the components of the internet, including the network edge and the network core. We also learned and solved problems relating to delay and throughput, and studied protocol layers. Some concepts about network security were outlined. In … Read more