Need of encryption in My project.

[Parul Bagadia]

Hello,
I am doing a project in USB OVER IP, which is about sharing a remote USB device
from your workstation, for ex. say two PCs are connected by LAN and a scanner is attached to one PC and user sitting at other workstation can access that scanner ; and all of its functionality.
We will be implementing it in Device Driver, so that it wont have any specifications of OS and it will work between diiferent Operating Systems; such as if one PC is having Windows And other Linux, then also you'll be able to access the remote device. This project is already existing , we have to add layer of encryption in it.
Am not clear about its need. Can someone explain this or suggest the books on it?

[sicarie]

What language are you doing this in?

[Parul Bagadia]

We are using C; I got the answer for this.
In network there will be obviously many PCs, but i want only one to communicate with my device which is connected to server; so that's the reason why we are using encryption.

[sicarie]

@Parul Bagadia
So you don't need anymore help with this?

[Parul Bagadia]

@sicarie
Hopefully not; if you agree with my point that this is the reason why i need security in my project.:-).. If not; yes i still need help on this.

[Parul Bagadia]

Actually the basic threat i came to know is even if some data packet doesn't belong to the particular PC in network; it can accept it. But i dont know how that will be achieved practiacally... Can someone explain...
I mean every1 must b knowing the process of broadcasting; server sends a message having header; which is checked by all clients n whichever clients needs or say values match with it it accepts the packet... So if some PC deciedes to accept all of them; privacy wont be there; but how do we achieve this practically; so that i can see wether our selected algorithm really blocks this or not.

[sicarie]

@Parul Bagadia
If you're in a more modern switched network, then you don't need to worry about this thanks to most switches' routing tables. A good sniffer might still be able to pick some traffic up (or a malicious PC accepting all packets), but if it's encrypted, then you should be good.

There are various levels of paranoia you can reach while worrying about something like this - the most paranoid would be to create a small client to be installed on the specific host that requires your application, then it could generate some sort of PGP key on install (assuming it's done by a trusted admin) to register with your 'host' application and require login to start the client, and that would be the basis of the encryption used.

Depending on how you set it up, a different level of security on that could be something like using an SSL connection.

It really depends how paranoid you want to get, and the equipment you're using.