HACKER FUNDAMENTALSA Tale of Two Standards

HACKER FUNDAMENTALS

A Tale of Two Standards 

OSI, TCP and What's Going on Here?

A good way to understand what a protocol is, would be to view it like a language. If people were network interfaces and all spoke their own language, there would be no way for them to properly communicate. A protocol works the same way, by agreeing to use certain methods or standards, many groups can build and create things that can all communicate with each other. So when you see TCP/IP protocol, think of it like a collection of rules computers must all follow to allow the millions and millions of networked machines called the Internet to function.

OSI was never meant to be just a model. Back in the 1970s, it was a competing protocol against TCP/IP and was actually a better protocol in design. The main reason it didn't take hold was that its addresses were hexadecimal and very complex. In fact, it was thought back then, that it had too many available addresses. Being based in hex, it allowed far more than the current protocol standard of IPv4. I should point out that the next version of IP, version 6, uses hex addresses which allow many more available ranges then IPv4. Go figure.

Examples of addresses include:

Hexadecimal - 12:34:56:78:9A:BC

IPv4 (current standard) - 74.125.225.98

IPv6 (new format) - fe80::223:4eff:fec0:5b48

A Tale of Two Models

OSI is still used today to describe network communication and for standards to unite, while the TCP model is used to show relation between the various protocols it contains. Below is a diagram of how the two map out to each other.