Chapter 8

Securing Web Applications, Services, and Servers

Gerald Beuchelt,    The MITRE Corporation1, Bedford, MA, U.S.A.

1 Setting the Stage

The development of a distributed hypertext system in the early 1990s at the CERN in Switzerland was one of the defining moments in making the Internet available to an audience beyond academia and specialized communities. The combination of a simple, yet powerful, transport protocol—HTTP—with a specialization of the Standard Generic Markup Language (SGML) made it possible to render complex content on the fly and link related information, even if it was distributed.

As with many other information systems technologies, the early implementation of the Web included only very limited built-in security, especially ...

Get Computer and Information Security Handbook, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.