Data passing through most network traffic is not encrypted. This includes traffic that contains your account name and password. When logging in to a remote system using utilities such as telnet or ftp, your account name and password are sent over the network in plain text. This security issue can be resolved by encrypting all traffic between your host and a remote host.
Email in not an inherently secure mode of communication. There are, however, ways of making it more private and securing your username/password at login.
This provides a command line terminal access much like telnet, but provides strong authentication and encryption. It also allows encrypted copying of files to and from remote computers.
This allows transfer of files to and from remote computers, similar to FTP, except that all file transfers are encrypted. SCP is usually distributed as part of the SSH toolkit.
The SSL protocol is mainly used for securing HTTP traffic over the Web.
This is available if you are connecting to campus from offcampus (outside the campus firewall) and want all traffic encrypted. More information and VPN clients can be found at the CIS Network Group's VPN page.
