Author Michal Zalewski is respected in the hacking and security communities for his intelligence, curiosity and creativity, and this book is truly unlike anything else. Silence on the Wire is no humdrum white paper or how-to manual for protecting one's network. Rather, this narrative explores a variety of unique, uncommon and often elegant security challenges that defy classification and eschew the traditional attacker-victim model.

There are many ways that a potential attacker can intercept information, or learn more about the sender, as the information travels over a network. Silence on the Wire uncovers these silent attacks so that system administrators can defend against them, as well as better understand and monitor their systems.

Silence on the Wire dissects several unique and fascinating security and privacy problems associated with the technologies and protocols used in everyday computing, and shows how to use this knowledge to learn more about others or to better defend systems. By taking an indepth look at modern computing, from hardware on up, the book helps the system administrator to better understand security issues, and to approach networking from a new, more creative perspective. The sys admin can apply this knowledge to network monitoring, policy enforcement, evidence analysis, IDS, honeypots, firewalls, and forensics.