Network Security Using Hybrid Port Knocking

The main objective of this work is to develop and evaluate the performance of a new PK technique, which can avert all types of port attacks and meets all network security requirements. The new technique utilizes three wellknown concepts, these are: port-knocking (PK), steganography, and mutual authentication, therefore, it is referred to as the hybrid port-knocking (HPK) technique. It can be used for host authentication to make local services invisible from port scanning, provide an extra layer of security that attackers must penetrate before accessing or breaking anything important, act as a stopgap security measure for services with known un-patched vulnerabilities, and provide a wrapper for a legacy or proprietary services with insufficient integrated security. The performance of the proposed technique was evaluated by measuring the average authentication time, which also compared with the average authentication time for a number of currently used port authentication techniques.