Applying Penetration Tests on a Highly Secured Cooperative Network

Security plays a vital role in the design; development and practical use of the distributed computing environment, for greater availability and access to information in turn imply that distributed systems are more prone to attacks. The need for practical solutions for secure networked system management is becoming increasingly significant. Any cooperative network should be supplied with different security techniques and tools. This paper deals with subjecting a highly secured cooperative network to successive penetration tests. An experimental network is built to represent a typical layout for a cooperative network and it is supplied with a variety of security techniques such as, Virtual Local Area Networks (VLAN), Virtual Private Network (VPN), Intrusion Detection System (IDS), Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) server, Secure Shell Header (SSH), Access Control List (ACL), WLAN security Techniques and Network Address Translation (NAT). Our tests focus on the evaluation of the importance of each security technique and the effect of their absence on the security level of the network. This work could assist the future introduction of security evaluation matrices.