Security Intelligence: A Practitioner's Guide to Solving Enterprise Security Challenges

CHAPTER 1

Fundamentals of Secure Proxies

The evolution of the secure proxy is a reflection of the evolution of the web. The proxy began as a gateway that bridged content that was processed and managed by various information systems, and served that content to the open web during the early days of Internet web construction. The term web proxy server was given to this general intermediary to reflect its main duty at the time, namely, translating web requests from the Internet to representations that could be understood and fulfilled by different internal systems, and vice versa.

The web has evolved, expanded, and flourished from a content-centric, information-sharing system into an elaborate ecosystem for commerce, an acculturation establishment for Millennials, and a foundation for modern-day cloud computing. The web browser has become the instrument that unlocks all of the wealth the web offers. The fundamental web protocols and technology, such as HTTP, SSL, HTML, XML, Java, and JavaScript, have been amalgamated into a complex conduit, which faces relentless assaults from nefarious forces that try to subvert it for profit. However, private intellectual properties and confidential data hosted in private and protected networks are accessible through a browser over secure connections across the Internet. The web has also been adopted as a system of portals for managing critical infrastructures at municipal, state, and national levels. Consequently, the user and the browser have ...