WHAT IS TCP/IP?

Introduction

Hey!, my name is Nathaneal and I am a 17 year old ‘Cyber Security student’ and a Penetration Tester. My articles are mostly focused on the people who are planing to start a career in Cyber Security and Ethical Hacking or students who have already started, to teach the basics of Hacking and Networking. In this article you’ll be able to learn the basics of the ‘TCP/IP’ Model. So without getting straight into the topic lets learn the definitions of TCP and IP individually.

TCP [Transmission control Protocol]

So the TCP protocol is one of the main protocols in the internet. It’s main responsibility is to send or transport data packets over the internet and it is used to create a connection between remote computers by transporting and ensuring the delivery of data packets (messages) over the supporting networks and the Internet.

In TCP while it is been delivered over the internet the TCP breaks large data packets into small packets and reassemble all the packets in the at the destination node, which is also known as the act of ensuring the integrity of data. So I hope you’ll got the basic definition of transmission control protocol.

IP [Internet Protocol]

“Do you know the route to the hospital?” , “Well No, but the Internet protocol will help you to find the route”. Alright so basically what the IP does is, it describes how data packets move through a network. over the internet IP network forwards or route their packets based on their IP addresses, well if you don’t know what an IP address is, its basically a 32-bit(IPv4) or 128-bit(IPv6) number which defines the destination address for the data packet to travel to its specified address device in the internet. This process can be shown as how a postman delivers a letter to the specified address written by the author of the letter.

[Eg-: ‘192.168.12.34(IPv4) & ‘FE80::0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329’ (IPv6)]

With learning what an IP address is, routing is one of the main functions of the IP protocol. Routing consists of forwarding IP packets from source to destination machines over a network, based on their IP addresses and this is done by the famous network device “the Router”.

Alright, so now you have learnt the differences between of TCP and IP, let’s continue to learn about the TCP/IP model.

TCP/IP

This table shows you the different layers among the two network models and their respective protocols.

Back to the topic: According to what I have researched TCP/IP was developed in the 1970s and adopted as the protocol standard for ARPANET (Advanced Research Project Agency Network). So the TCP/IP can be described as a suite of communication protocols which is used to connect to hosts in the internet. So if you combine the functions of TCP and the IP protocol which you’ll learnt earlier the TCP is the component that collects and reassembles the packets of data, while IP is responsible for making sure the packets are sent to the right destination. That’s right this communication suite combines both the protocols and does everything at once.

There are three common protocols in the TCP/IP stack. Which are:

1. HTTP (Hyper text transfer protocol): This is used to communicate between the website and the web server. When a web client sends a request to a web server to view a web page. The web server receives that request and sends the web page information back to the web client but remember this protocol is not safe it means if you were entering your bank credentials to a bank website which uses HTTP a Hacker could Sniff your network and grab the credentials and other sought of information cause this protocol isn’t using any encryption mechanism.

2. HTTPS (Hyper text transfer protocol Secure): This functions same as the as the HTTP but with ‘S’ added which means ‘secure’ even if the attacker sniffs your network he wouldn’t be able to grab the credentials or any other transferred data over the network.

3. FTP (File Transfer Protocol): This protocol is used to transfer files between a client and a server. This protocol also doesn’t use any encryption mechanism to protect the data over the network but there is a encrypted version of FTP which is called “SFTP” (Secure File transfer protocol).

This is a diagram of a TCP/IP packet. If you examine the packet you could see the Source address and the destination address which needs the TCP/IP suite to disassemble the packets and assemble the packet at the destination address with the usage of the IP protocol to route the packet.

So I hope you’ll learnt the how the data packets moved across the internet which will we be very useful in cyber security. Thank You! , Stay Safe :)