Virtual Enterprises and Security

摘要

In the industry the communication security has got an increasing role due to the increasing number of virtual enterprise (VE) realizations. As the basic characteristics of VEs is the communication on the Internet, and during these transactions huge amount of extremely valuable technical data, and information (product, process data besides the business information) are moving between the members of the networks, the security has became a vital problem of this field. The paper introduces shortly the main characteristics of VEs and some VE reference architectures and the communication architectures and protocols they can use. In the second part the hardware and software security methods, approaches and tools are shortly described that can be applied during the transfer of technical related data, information on the network, and on the computer while storing or handling the information. The main goal of the paper is to call the attention of the industrial community with some examples to the importance of security in (computer) network communication.