An attacker is intent on disturbing the communication by inserting bogus packets into the communications.

A. Discuss whether such an attack would succeed in systems protected by IPsec.

B. Discuss whether such an attack would succeed in systems protected by SSL.

A. No, it would not succeed.

B. Yes, the attack will succeed.

Explanation:

In the seven-layer OSI model of computer networking, packet strictly refers to a protocol data unit at layer 3, the network layer. So if an attacker wants to insert bogus / fake packets this will happen at the network layer.

A. IPSec works on network layer (the IP layer) of the OSI model protecting and authenticating IP packets. It provides data integrity, authentication and confidentiality between participating peers at the IP layer.

Thus, inserting bogus packets into the communications by an attacker will not have any affect on security of a system which has IPSec security and therefore it will not succeed.

B. SSL/TLS is an application layer protocol that fits into layer 5 to 7 of the OSI model. However, an attack by inserting bogus packets into the communications will succeed as SSL only provides protection for layer 5 to 7 and not the network layer.