How secure is my web gateway? Read the Secure Web Gateway Explained guide.
Secure Web Gateway Explained
Web Security Gateway is one of the key components of a web application firewall. A firewall is an intelligent system that filters the incoming traffic and decides whether it is malicious or not. It also filters the outgoing traffic and prevents the user to access malicious websites.
Security gateways are designed to inspect data packets using a set of rules. This helps them to identify suspicious activities and block malicious traffic. A Security gateway is a network appliance.
This is designed to protect a network from security threats such as hackers and viruses. So, the security gateway has two main components, one is a firewall and the other one is an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). Some important features make up a security gateway. I will be listing some of the key ones here.
Server Side Includes (SSI)
Server Side Includes (SSI) is an easy way for web developers to include dynamic content within their web pages. So, it is a server-side scripting language for generating static web pages. Also, this feature is known as Server Side Includes (SSI).
Moreover, it is a scripting language that helps in adding dynamic content within the static pages. So, the server evaluates the SSI commands and generates the content with the help of the server variables and expressions. Hence, the server variables and expressions are available at the time of execution.
SSI allows developers to specify their tags for embedding variable information within the HTML document. Embedding variables into HTML documents helps in maintaining a single version of data. This can be accessed by various users at different times and places.
For example, if you are maintaining a catalog of various products. It is better to maintain one product catalog rather than maintaining multiple copies of data in different locations. Thus, SSI is supported by most web servers, including Apache, Microsoft IIS, and SunONE.
Some web servers do not support SSI and they will not process all of the SSI commands properly. Although you can enable SSI on all these web servers, all these web servers will not process all of these commands properly. Thus, SSI is supported by all major browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Netscape Navigator.
Double Submit Cookies
Double submit cookies are used as session identifiers for tracking user sessions on websites. Whenever a user uses a website or submits any form on that website or clicks any button or link on that website. This is by using his browser then his session gets identified using double submit cookies.
Once he logs out from that website or closes his browser or computer then this cookie gets deleted from that device. But will still be available on the main server of that website where he has logged in previously. This is using double submit cookies so that his session can be tracked even.
This is after he has logged out from that website or closed his browser or computer. Thus, it can be achieved by deleting double submit cookies from his device. However, will still be available on the main server of this website where he has already logged in previously using double submit cookies.