For the Internet, security was an afterthought. It is often said that the Internet was not designed with security in mind. The Internet is composed of many different technologies and is inherently open. Openness was one of the design goals behind basic Internet technologies like TCP/IP, which is a hardware and network independent protocol. While this enables any computer or network to be connected to the Internet it also makes it easy for hackers to attempt break-ins while at the same time making them hard to trace.

The rise in the complexity and diversity of the Internet has caused the need for security expertise to exceed the supply. As a result, inexperienced technical staff often implement security measures that are vulnerable to hackers.

On the Internet, hackers don't always need to break in to access confidential information since much of the traffic on the Internet is not encrypted. Encryption has been a growing area of activity in the past few years and today intranets, extranets, and email all involve some type of security. Developing Internet standards have come to drive security technology.

The purpose of this article is to familiarize you with the basic Internet security technologies. Over the next few months we'll look at Domino's historical security model and contrast this with the emerging Internet standards-bases security technologies that will be integrated into Domino 5.0 and beyond.

Encryption
The best place to start is with encryption. Encryption means that information is scrambled so that only authorized people or systems can understand it. Understanding encrypted information requires decrypting it. For example, substituting numbers for letters is a primitive form or encryption. To decrypt the information you have to know what numbers represent what letters. In this example, the mapping of letters to numbers is a simple an encryption key used to guarantee the privacy of information.