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Security

Security concerns are typically broken down into the following areas:

We might add another: legal recognition! All the security in the world is not much use if it is not backed up by some sort of legal position, if you want to charge people for information, exchange contracts over networks etc etcgif

Berners-Lee lists the following specific checklist for existing WWW servers:

Finally, note that keeping logs is a very important part of security. Any secure system will attract more attempts to hack simply because it poses more of a challenge, but also because there is potentially more monetary gain hacking a system that someone has apparently spent money to protect. A system always has vulnerabilities (there is no such thing as 100 % security, just 100 % lack of detected hacks). If you keep audit trails, then it is possible to track a lot more problems. It may also be possible to track the cause of the loophole and fix it.

Finally, always keep backups of valuable data!.





next up previous contents
Next: Public Key Cryptography Up: Problems with WWW Previous: Billing



Jon Crowcroft
Wed May 10 11:46:29 BST 1995