Pasic: A Novel Approach for Page-Wise Web Application Security

Abstract

Secured access to Web contents and the interaction with Web application are becoming one of the most important issues in the context of Internet. HTTP protocol which uses plain text transmission is employed for data communication over Internet. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates over HTTP evolve into HTTPS protocol which is one of most used solutions that provide security. However the same certificate has been used for all the pages irrespective of sensitivity of the data. Moreover, data with different security requirements have been secured using the same algorithm which could either reduce the performance of the Web application or do not provide the appropriate security according to the nature of each data item. In order to compensate the degradation in the quality of service, it is proposed to use appropriate encryption and integrity algorithms for each page, based on the sensitivity of information and security requirements for the data. A gradation of security levels namely high, medium, and low has been proposed. A combination of different algorithms are considered to provide confidentiality and integrity for each level of security. The proposed approach is experimented with a prototype in healthcare domain.