CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study

Networking in computer science is simply the connection of multiple electronic devices known as nodes for the purpose of exchanging information and this concept was groomed out of the need for man to connect and share information (which may be in the form of voice, video or data). The largest network in the world is the Internet and is described as a collection of vast mixture of networks in terms of topologies, architecture and communication technologies which however, utilizes a common set of protocols to offer certain services. In short, it is termed the network of networks (Ciubotaru & Muntean, 2013; Forcht & Fore, 1995). The Internet has aided in many major advancement and development today in our society. There has been an alarming rate of internet users from 400 million in 2000 to more than 3 billion internet users in 2015 (International Telecommunication Union, 2015).

Many organizations utilize the World Wide Web (www), one of the major and widely used service of the Internet to share information. The World Wide Web (www) is an information space in which relevant items, known as resources (e.g. image, audio, video or any other file), are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) (Berners-Lee, et al., 2004); in 2001 Google, a multinational technology company announced it provided customers direct access to 3 billion web documents on the Internet (Googlepress, 2001).

This technical wizardry of communication around the world has begotten the proliferation of computers and other ubiquitous devices since the 1960s and with it, a demand for organization to protect their digital information from unauthorized users and provide services to authorized users. The concern to protect information is a product of the Internet being a fully decentralized network and depends on voluntary cooperation between the thousands of network administrators throughout the world to provide individuals with access to this network of tremendously varied resources. Thus, the Internet is a public network owned by no one and sensitive information should be made exclusive to only the rightful recipient (Forcht & Fore, 1995; Menezes, Van Oorschot & Vanstone, 1997).

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