Understanding networks part 1

welcome to hacking a rise i am the laughing man the one and only i am him so i was going true the blog and i see i haven’t really explained how networks work so in this post and a few others to come we are going to explain it as i believe a hacker should a good understanding of networks so lets start lads

IPS

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label assigned to each device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication An IP address serves two main functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing.

Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) defines an IP address as a 32-bit number. However, because of the growth of the Internet and the depletion of available IPv4 addresses, a new version of IP (IPv6), using 128 bits for the IP address, was standardized in 1998.[3][4][5] IPv6 deployment has been ongoing since the mid-2000s.

IP addresses are written and displayed in human-readable notations, such as 172.16.254.1 in IPv4, and 2001:db8:0:1234:0:567:8:1 in IPv6. The size of the routing prefix of the address is designated in CIDR notation by suffixing the address with the number of significant bits, e.g., 192.168.1.15/24, which is equivalent to the historically used subnet mask 255.255.255.0.

The IP address space is managed globally by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and by five regional Internet registries (RIRs) responsible in their designated territories for assignment to local Internet registries, such as Internet service providers, and other end users. IPv4 addresses were distributed by IANA to the RIRs in blocks of approximately 16.8 million addresses each, but have been exhausted at the IANA level since 2011. Only one of the RIRs still has a supply for local assignments in Africa.

Network administrators assign an IP address to each device connected to a network. Such assignments may be on a static (fixed or permanent) or dynamic basis, depending on network practices and software features.

ports

In computer networking, a port is a communication endpoint. Physical as well as wireless connections are terminated at ports of hardware devices. At the software level, within an operating system, a port is a logical construct that identifies a specific process or a type of network service. Ports are identified for each protocol and address combination by 16-bit unsigned numbers, commonly known as the port number. The most common protocols that use port numbers are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP).

A port number is always associated with an IP address of a host and the protocol type of the communication. It completes the destination or origination network address of a message. Specific port numbers are commonly reserved to identify specific services, so that an arriving packet can be easily forwarded to a running application. For this purpose, the lowest numbered 1024 port numbers identify the historically most commonly used services, and are called the well-known port numbers. Higher-numbered ports are available for general use by applications and are known as ephemeral ports.

When used as a service enumeration, ports provide a multiplexing service for multiple services or multiple communication sessions at one network address. In the client–server model of application architecture multiple simultaneous communication sessions may be initiated for the same service.

TCP

The Transmission Control Protocol provides a communication service at an intermediate level between an application program and the Internet Protocol. It provides host-to-host connectivity at the transport layer of the Internet model. An application does not need to know the particular mechanisms for sending data via a link to another host, such as the required IP fragmentation to accommodate the maximum transmission unit of the transmission medium. At the transport layer, TCP handles all handshaking and transmission details and presents an abstraction of the network connection to the application typically through a network socket interface.

At the lower levels of the protocol stack, due to network congestion, traffic load balancing, or unpredictable network behaviour, IP packets may be lost, duplicated, or delivered out of order. TCP detects these problems, requests re-transmission of lost data, rearranges out-of-order data and even helps minimize network congestion to reduce the occurrence of the other problems. If the data still remains undelivered, the source is notified of this failure. Once the TCP receiver has reassembled the sequence of octets originally transmitted, it passes them to the receiving application. Thus, TCP abstracts the application’s communication from the underlying networking details.

TCP is used extensively by many internet applications, including the World Wide Web (WWW), email, File Transfer Protocol, Secure Shell, peer-to-peer file sharing, and streaming media.

TCP is optimized for accurate delivery rather than timely delivery and can incur relatively long delays (on the order of seconds) while waiting for out-of-order messages or re-transmissions of lost messages. Therefore, it is not particularly suitable for real-time applications such as voice over IP. For such applications, protocols like the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) operating over the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) are usually recommended instead.

TCP is a reliable stream delivery service which guarantees that all bytes received will be identical and in the same order as those sent. Since packet transfer by many networks is not reliable, TCP achieves this using a technique known as positive acknowledgement with re-transmission. This requires the receiver to respond with an acknowledgement message as it receives the data. The sender keeps a record of each packet it sends and maintains a timer from when the packet was sent. The sender re-transmits a packet if the timer expires before receiving the acknowledgement. The timer is needed in case a packet gets lost or corrupted.

While IP handles actual delivery of the data, TCP keeps track of segments – the individual units of data transmission that a message is divided into for efficient routing through the network. For example, when an HTML file is sent from a web server, the TCP software layer of that server divides the file into segments and forwards them individually to the internet layer in the network stack. The internet layer software encapsulates each TCP segment into an IP packet by adding a header that includes (among other data) the destination IP address. When the client program on the destination computer receives them, the TCP software in the transport layer re-assembles the segments and ensures they are correctly ordered and error-free as it streams the file contents to the receiving app.

UDP

UDP is a simple message-oriented transport layer protocol that is documented in RFC 768. Although UDP provides integrity verification (via checksum) of the header and payload,it provides no guarantees to the upper layer protocol for message delivery and the UDP layer retains no state of UDP messages once sent. For this reason, UDP sometimes is referred to as Unreliable Datagram Protocol. If transmission reliability is desired, it must be implemented in the user’s application.

A number of UDP’s attributes make it especially suited for certain applications.

It is transaction-oriented, suitable for simple query-response protocols such as the Domain Name System or the Network Time Protocol.
It provides datagrams, suitable for modeling other protocols such as IP tunneling or remote procedure call and the Network File System.
It is simple, suitable for bootstrapping or other purposes without a full protocol stack, such as the DHCP and Trivial File Transfer Protocol.
It is stateless, suitable for very large numbers of clients, such as in streaming media applications such as IPTV.
The lack of retransmission delays makes it suitable for real-time applications such as Voice over IP, online games, and many protocols using Real Time Streaming Protocol.
Because it supports multicast, it is suitable for broadcast information such as in many kinds of service discovery and shared information such as Precision Time Protocol and Routing Information Protocol.

There ya have it lads and gals i will be doing a post on each of theses in the future so u can have a better undstaning of the way networks work this a brief example of whats to come on hacking a rise