WEB TECHNOLOGIES

A COMPUTER SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE

JEFFREY C. JACKSON

Chapter 1
Web Essentials: Clients, Servers,
and Communication

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 The Internet
• Technical origin: ARPANET (late 1960’s)
– One of earliest attempts to network
heterogeneous, geographically dispersed
computers
– Email first available on ARPANET in 1972
(and quickly very popular!)
• ARPANET access was limited to select
DoD-funded organizations

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 The Internet
• Open-access networks
– Regional university networks (e.g., SURAnet)
– CSNET for CS departments not on ARPANET
• NSFNET (1985-1995)
– Primary purpose: connect supercomputer
centers
– Secondary purpose: provide backbone to
connect regional networks

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 The Internet

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 The Internet
• Internet: the network of networks
connected via the public backbone and
communicating using TCP/IP
communication protocol
– Backbone initially supplied by NSFNET,
privately funded (ISP fees) beginning in 1995

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 Internet Protocols
• Communication protocol: how computers
talk
– Cf. telephone “protocol”: how you answer and
end call, what language you speak, etc.
• Internet protocols developed as part of
ARPANET research
– ARPANET began using TCP/IP in 1982
• Designed for use both within local area
networks (LAN’s) and between networks

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 Internet Protocol (IP)
• IP is the fundamental protocol defining
the Internet (as the name implies!)
• IP address:
– 32-bit number (in IPv4)
– Associated with at most one device at a time
(although device may have more than one)
– Written as four dot-separated bytes, e.g.
192.0.34.166

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 IP
• IP function: transfer data from source device to
destination device
• IP source software creates a packet
representing the data
– Header: source and destination IP addresses, length
of data, etc.
– Data itself
• If destination is on another LAN, packet is sent
to a gateway that connects to more than one
network

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 IP

Source

Network
1

Gateway Destinatio
n

Gateway

Network Network
2 3

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 IP

Source

LAN
1

Gateway Destinatio
n

Gateway

Internet LAN
Backbone 2

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 Transmission Control Protocol
(TCP)
• Limitations of IP:
– No guarantee of packet delivery (packets can
be dropped)
– Communication is one-way (source to
destination)
• TCP adds concept of a connection on top
of IP
– Provides guarantee that packets delivered
– Provide two-way (full duplex) communication

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 TCP
Can I talk to
Establish
connection
.
{ you?
OK. Can I talk to
you?
OK
.

{
Here’s a packet.
Send packet
Source Destination
with Got
acknowledgment it.
.
Here’s a packet.

{
Resend packet if
no (or delayed) Here’s a resent
acknowledgment packet.
. Got
it.
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 TCP
• TCP also adds concept of a port
– TCP header contains port number
representing an application program on the
destination computer
– Some port numbers have standard meanings
• Example: port 25 is normally used for email
transmitted using the Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol (SMTP)
– Other port numbers are available first-come-
first served to any application

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 TCP

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 User Datagram Protocol (UDP)
• Like TCP in that:
– Builds on IP
– Provides port concept
• Unlike TCP in that:
– No connection concept
– No transmission guarantee
• Advantage of UDP vs. TCP:
– Lightweight, so faster for one-time messages

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 Domain Name Service (DNS)
• DNS is the “phone book” for the Internet
– Map between host names and IP addresses
– DNS often uses UDP for communication
• Host names
– Labels separated by dots, e.g., www.example.
org
– Final label is top-level domain
• Generic: .com, .org, etc.
• Country-code: .us, .il, etc.

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 DNS
• Domains are divided into second-level
domains, which can be further divided
into subdomains, etc.
– E.g., in www.example.com, example is a
second-level domain
• A host name plus domain name
information is called the fully qualified
domain name of the computer
– Above, www is the host name, www.example.
com is the FQDN

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 DNS
• nslookup program provides command-
line access to DNS (on most systems)
• looking up a host name given an IP
address is known as a reverse lookup
– Recall that single host may have mutliple IP
addresses.
– Address returned is the canonical IP address
specified in the DNS system.

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 Analogy to Telephone Network
• IP ~ the telephone network
• TCP ~ calling someone who answers,
having a conversation, and hanging up
• UDP ~ calling someone and leaving a
message
• DNS ~ directory assistance

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 Higher-level Protocols
• Many protocols build on TCP
– Telephone analogy: TCP specifies how we
initiate and terminate the phone call, but
some other protocol specifies how we carry
on the actual conversation
• Some examples:
– SMTP (email)
– FTP (file transfer)
– HTTP (transfer of Web documents)

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 World Wide Web
• Originally, one of several systems for
organizing Internet-based information
– Competitors: WAIS, Gopher, ARCHIE
• Distinctive feature of Web: support for
hypertext (text containing links)
– Communication via Hypertext Transport
Protocol (HTTP)
– Document representation using Hypertext
Markup Language (HTML)

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 World Wide Web
• The Web is the collection of machines
(Web servers) on the Internet that provide
information, particularly HTML documents,
via HTTP.
• Machines that access information on the
Web are known as Web clients. A Web
browser is software used by an end user
to access the Web.

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 Hypertext Transport Protocol
(HTTP)
• HTTP is based on the request-response
communication model:
– Client sends a request
– Server sends a response
• HTTP is a stateless protocol:
– The protocol does not require the server to
remember anything about the client between
requests.

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 HTTP
• Normally implemented over a TCP connection
(80 is standard port number for HTTP)
• Typical browser-server interaction:
– User enters Web address in browser
– Browser uses DNS to locate IP address
– Browser opens TCP connection to server
– Browser sends HTTP request over connection
– Server sends HTTP response to browser over
connection
– Browser displays body of response in the client area
of the browser window

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 HTTP
• The information transmitted using HTTP
is often entirely text
• Can use the Internet’s Telnet protocol to
simulate browser request and view server
response

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 HTTP

Connec { $ telnet www.example.org 80

t Trying 192.0.34.166...
Connected to www.example.com
(192.0.34.166).
Escape character is ’^]’.

{
Send GET / HTTP/1.1
Reques Host: www.example.org
t

{
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Receive
Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2003 20:30:49 GMT
Respons
…
e

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 HTTP Request
• Structure of the request:
– start line
– header field(s)
– blank line
– optional body

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 HTTP Request
• Structure of the request:
– 1. start line
– header field(s)
– blank line
– optional body

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 HTTP Request
• Start line
– Example: GET / HTTP/1.1
• Three space-separated parts:
– HTTP request method
– Request-URI
– HTTP version

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 HTTP Request
• Start line
– Example: GET / HTTP/1.1
• Three space-separated parts:
– HTTP request method
– Request-URI
– HTTP version
• We will cover 1.1, in which version part of start
line must be exactly as shown

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 HTTP Request
• Start line
– Example: GET / HTTP/1.1
• Three space-separated parts:
– HTTP request method
– Request-URI
– HTTP version

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 HTTP Request
• Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)
– Syntax:scheme : scheme-depend-part
• Ex: In http://www.example.com/
the scheme is http
– Request-URI is the portion of the requested
URI that follows the host name (which is
supplied by the required Host header field)
• Ex: / is Request-URI portion of http://www.
example.com/

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 URI
• URI’s are of two types:
– Uniform Resource Name (URN)
• Can be used to identify resources with unique
names, such as books (which have unique ISBN’s)
• Scheme is urn
– Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
• Specifies location at which a resource can be
found
• In addition to http, some other URL schemes are
https, ftp, mailto, and file

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 HTTP Request
• Start line
– Example: GET / HTTP/1.1
• Three space-separated parts:
– HTTP request method
– Request-URI
– HTTP version

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 HTTP Request
• Common request methods:
– GET
• Used if link is clicked or address typed in browser
• No body in request with GET method
– POST
• Used when submit button is clicked on a form
• Form information contained in body of request
– HEAD
• Requests that only header fields (no body) be
returned in the response

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 HTTP Request
• Structure of the request:
– start line
– 2. header field(s)
– blank line
– optional body

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 HTTP Request
• Header field structure:
– field name : field value
• Syntax
– Field name is not case sensitive
– Field value may continue on multiple lines by
starting continuation lines with white space
– Field values may contain MIME types, quality
values, and wildcard characters (*’s)

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 Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions (MIME)
• Convention for specifying content type of
a message
– In HTTP, typically used to specify content
type of the body of the response
• MIME content type syntax:
– top-level type / subtype
• Examples: text/html, image/jpeg

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 HTTP Quality Values and
Wildcards
• Example header field with quality values:
accept:
text/xml,text/html;q=0.9,
text/plain;q=0.8, image/jpeg,
image/gif;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1
• Quality value applies to all preceding
items
• Higher the value, higher the preference
• Note use of wildcards to specify quality
0.1 for any MIME type not specified earlier
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 HTTP Request
• Common header fields:
– Host: host name from URL (required)
– User-Agent: type of browser sending request
– Accept: MIME types of acceptable documents
– Connection: value close tells server to close
connection after single request/response
– Content-Type: MIME type of (POST) body, normally
application/x-www-form-urlencoded
– Content-Length: bytes in body
– Referer: URL of document containing link that
supplied URI for this HTTP request

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 HTTP Response
• Structure of the response:
– status line
– header field(s)
– blank line
– optional body

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 HTTP Response
• Structure of the response:
– 1. status line
– header field(s)
– blank line
– optional body

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 HTTP Response
• Status line
– Example: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
• Three space-separated parts:
– HTTP version
– status code
– reason phrase (intended for human use)

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 HTTP Response
• Status code
– Three-digit number
– First digit is class of the status code:
• 1=Informational
• 2=Success
• 3=Redirection (alternate URL is supplied)
• 4=Client Error
• 5=Server Error
– Other two digits provide additional information

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 HTTP Response
• Structure of the response:
– status line
– 2. header field(s)
– blank line
– optional body

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 HTTP Response
• Common header fields:
– Connection, Content-Type, Content-Length
– Date: date and time at which response was
generated (required)
– Location: alternate URI if status is redirection
– Last-Modified: date and time the requested resource
was last modified on the server
– Expires: date and time after which the client’s copy of
the resource will be out-of-date
– ETag: a unique identifier for this version of the
requested resource (changes if resource changes)

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 Client Caching
• A cache is a local copy of information
obtained from some other source
• Most web browsers use cache to store
requested resources so that subsequent
requests to the same resource will not
necessarily require an HTTP request/
response
– Ex: icon appearing multiple times in a Web
page

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 Client Caching
Clien Serve
t r

1. HTTP request for

image
2. HTTP response containing
image
Browser Web
Server

3. Store
image

Cache

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 Client Caching
Clien Serve
t r

Browser Web
Server
I need
that
image
again…

Cache

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 Client Caching
Clien Serve
t r

This
…
HTTP request for
Browser image Web
HTTP response containing Server
I need
that image
image
again…

Cache

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 Client Caching
Clien Serve
t r

Browser Web
Server
I need
that
image
again…
Get … or
imag this
e
Cache

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 Client Caching
• Cache advantages
– (Much) faster than HTTP request/response
– Less network traffic
– Less load on server
• Cache disadvantage
– Cached copy of resource may be invalid
(inconsistent with remote version)

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 Client Caching
• Validating cached resource:
– Send HTTP HEAD request and check Last-
Modified or ETag header in response
– Compare current date/time with Expires
header sent in response containing resource
– If no Expires header was sent, use heuristic
algorithm to estimate value for Expires
• Ex: Expires = 0.01 * (Date – Last-Modified) + Date

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 Character Sets
• Every document is represented by a string of
integer values (code points)
• The mapping from code points to characters is
defined by a character set
• Some header fields have character set values:
– Accept-Charset: request header listing character sets
that the client can recognize
• Ex: accept-charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
– Content-Type: can include character set used to
represent the body of the HTTP message
• Ex: Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

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 Character Sets
• Technically, many “character sets” are
actually character encodings
– An encoding represents code points using
variable-length byte strings
– Most common examples are Unicode-based
encodings UTF-8 and UTF-16
• IANA maintains complete list of Internet-
recognized character sets/encodings

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 Character Sets
• Typical US PC produces ASCII documents
• US-ASCII character set can be used for such
documents, but is not recommended
• UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 are supersets of US-
ASCII and provide international compatibility
– UTF-8 can represent all ASCII characters using a
single byte each and arbitrary Unicode characters
using up to 4 bytes each
– ISO-8859-1 is 1-byte code that has many characters
common in Western European languages, such as é

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 Web Clients
• Many possible web clients:
– Text-only “browser” (lynx)
– Mobile phones
– Robots (software-only clients, e.g., search
engine “crawlers”)
– etc.
• We will focus on traditional web browsers

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 Web Browsers
• First graphical browser running on
general-purpose platforms: Mosaic (1993)

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 Web Browsers

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 Web Browsers
• Primary tasks:
– Convert web addresses (URL’s) to HTTP
requests
– Communicate with web servers via HTTP
– Render (appropriately display) documents
returned by a server

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 HTTP URL’s
http://www.example.org:56789/a/b/c.txt?t=win&s=chess#para5

host por pat quer fragmen

(FQDN) t h y t
authorit Request-
y URI

• Browser uses authority to connect via TCP

• Request-URI included in start line (/ used
for path if none supplied)
• Fragment identifier not sent to server
(used to scroll browser client area)

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 Web Browsers
• Standard features
– Save web page to disk
– Find string in page
– Fill forms automatically (passwords, CC numbers, …)
– Set preferences (language, character set, cache and
HTTP parameters)
– Modify display style (e.g., increase font sizes)
– Display raw HTML and HTTP header info (e.g., Last-
Modified)
– Choose browser themes (skins)
– View history of web addresses visited
– Bookmark favorite pages for easy return

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 Web Browsers
• Additional functionality:
– Execution of scripts (e.g., drop-down menus)
– Event handling (e.g., mouse clicks)
– GUI for controls (e.g., buttons)
– Secure communication with servers
– Display of non-HTML documents (e.g., PDF)
via plug-ins

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 Web Servers
• Basic functionality:
– Receive HTTP request via TCP
– Map Host header to specific virtual host (one of many
host names sharing an IP address)
– Map Request-URI to specific resource associated
with the virtual host
• File: Return file in HTTP response
• Program: Run program and return output in HTTP response
– Map type of resource to appropriate MIME type and
use to set Content-Type header in HTTP response
– Log information about the request and response

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 Web Servers
• httpd: UIUC, primary Web server c. 1995
• Apache: “A patchy” version of httpd, now the
most popular server (esp. on Linux platforms)
• IIS: Microsoft Internet Information Server
• Tomcat:
– Java-based
– Provides container (Catalina) for running Java
servlets (HTML-generating programs) as back-end to
Apache or IIS
– Can run stand-alone using Coyote HTTP front-end

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 Web Servers
• Some Coyote communication parameters:
– Allowed/blocked IP addresses
– Max. simultaneous active TCP connections
– Max. queued TCP connection requests
– “Keep-alive” time for inactive TCP
connections
• Modify parameters to tune server
performance

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 Web Servers
• Some Catalina container parameters:
– Virtual host names and associated ports
– Logging preferences
– Mapping from Request-URI’s to server
resources
– Password protection of resources
– Use of server-side caching

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 Tomcat Web Server
• HTML-based server administration
• Browse to
http://localhost:8080
and click on Server Administration link
– localhost is a special host name that means
“this machine”

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 Tomcat Web Server

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 Tomcat Web Server

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 Tomcat Web Server

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 Tomcat Web Server
• Some Connector fields:
– Port Number: port “owned” by this connector
– Max Threads: max connections processed
simultaneously
– Connection Timeout: keep-alive time

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 Tomcat Web Server

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 Tomcat Web Server
• Each Host is a virtual host (can have
multiple per Connector)
• Some fields:
– Host: localhost or a fully qualified domain
name
– Application Base: directory (may be path
relative to JWSDP installation directory)
containing resources associated with this Host

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 Tomcat Web Server

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 Tomcat Web Server
• Context provides mapping from Request-URI
path to a web application
• Document Base field is directory (possibly
relative to Application Base) that contains
resources for this web application
• For this example, browsing to
http://localhost:8080/
returns resource from
c:\jwsdp-1.3\webapps\ROOT
– Returns index.html (standard welcome file)

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 Tomcat Web Server
• Access log records HTTP requests
• Parameters set using AccessLogValve
• Default location: logs/access_log.* under
JWSDP installation directory
• Example “common” log format entry (one line):
www.example.org - admin
[20/Jul/2005:08:03:22 -0500]
"GET /admin/frameset.jsp HTTP/1.1"
200 920

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 Tomcat Web Server
• Other logs provided by default in JWSDP:
– Message log messages sent to log service by
web applications or Tomcat itself
• logs/jwsdp_log.*: default message log
• logs/localhost_admin_log.*: message log for
web apps within /admin context
– System.out and System.err output (exception
traces often found here):
• logs/launcher.server.log

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 Tomcat Web Server
• Access control:
– Password protection (e.g., admin pages)
• Users and roles defined in
conf/tomcat-users.xml
– Deny access to machines
• Useful for denying access to certain users by
denying access from the machines they use
• List of denied machines maintained in
RemoteHostValve (deny by host name) or
RemoteAddressValve (deny by IP address)

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 Secure Servers
• Since HTTP messages typically travel
over a public network, private information
(such as credit card numbers) should be
encrypted to prevent eavesdropping
• https URL scheme tells browser to use
encryption
• Common encryption standards:
– Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
– Transport Layer Security (TLS)

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 Secure Servers
I’d like to talk securely to you (over port
443)
HTTP Here’s my certificate and encryption HTTP
Request data Request
s s
Here’s an encrypted HTTP
TL request TL
S/ Here’s an encrypted HTTP S/ Web
Browser
SS response SS Server
L L

Here’s an encrypted HTTP

HTTP request HTTP
Response Here’s an encrypted HTTP Response
s response s

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 Secure Servers
Man-in-the-Middle Attack
Fake Fake
DNS www.example.org
Server 100.1.1.1
What’s IP
address for 100.1.1. My credit card number
www.example.org? 1 is…

Real
Browser www.example.org

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 Secure Servers
Preventing Man-in-the-Middle
Fake Fake
DNS www.example.org
Server 100.1.1.1
What’s IP
address for 100.1.1. Send me a certificate of
www.example.org? 1 identity

Real
Browser www.example.org

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 Case Study

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 Case Study
• What web server will we use?
– Tomcat
• What web browsers will we support?
– IE6, Mozilla
• What level of security will we implement?
– Non-secure (http scheme)
– Password required to add to blog

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0